307 — Interview With Author and Human Behavior Expert Dr. John Demartini

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Erick: Hello friends, my name is Eric Cloward and welcome to the Stoic Coffee Break. The Stoic Coffee Break is a weekly podcast where I take aspects of Stoicism and do my best to break them down to their most important points. I share my thoughts on Stoic philosophy, I share my experiences, both my successes and my failures, and I hope that you can learn something from them today.

all within the space of a coffee break. This week’s episode is an interview episode. So we’re going to be speaking with Dr. John Martini. He’s the author of several books and a researcher. And before I dive into telling you all about him, it’s easier if I just let him tell you, let him tell you about himself and where he’s at and what he does.

John: I am, I’m a relentless researcher, writer, traveler, and teacher. I’ve been teaching 52 years in November and uh, learning everything I can, anything to do with maximizing human awareness and potential and helping people become more masterful in their lives. I’ve been fascinated by it since I was a teenager.

I’m 70 this year. So I’ve been doing it this many, this many years now. And, um, I, right now I’m sailing between Hong Kong and Shanghai. So I’m, uh, I’ll be in Shanghai about noon tomorrow. So I’m out in the, in the sea out here outside the coast of China.

Erick: Nice. Nice. And you said when we were talking earlier, you mentioned that you had been doing this for 23 years.

That’s, that’s pretty amazing. Do you have a home base or just, just have the boat? I

John: live on the ship. I’ve been, I’ve been here for many years. I’ve had other homes. I’ve had 11 homes. Um, but I sold most of them when my wife passed away. And, um, I mainly just live in hotels around the world or here. And I’m mostly on my ship.

Erick: Nice. So, what is it that, that interests you most about human potential? What is it that, I guess, maybe from your early life that kind of drove you towards that? I guess your origin story, if you will.

John: Well, I was born with my arm and leg turned in, and at age one and a half, I had to start wearing braces. On my left side, and I found out I also had a speech impediment, so I used to put strings and buttons in my mouth as a kid, and then by the time I was out of the braces at four, uh, by around age six or so, I was told by my first grade teacher that I’m afraid your son has got learning problems, he’ll never be able to read or write or communicate.

Probably never go very far in life or melt much. I had to wear a dunce cap when I was in first grade with a guy named Bill Dalrymple. And, um, they did that those days, I guess that was normal then.

Erick: And

John: I, I learned the only way I was making it through school was by listening to the smart kids and I would ask them questions.

So I started surviving by learning to ask questions. I was curious. But I couldn’t read. I didn’t read till I was 18.

Erick: Oh, wow.

John: And, uh, I had, you know, speech and dyslexia and a bunch of things. But I made it through elementary school by asking kids questions. And then I’d end up dropping out and stopping school and became a street kid.

Um, I left home at 13. And I picked up surfing, of all things. Now, Texas wasn’t the surf capital, but That’s where I learned it and I hitchhiked out to California when I was 14 and made my way over to Hawaii at 15 and lived on the North Shore and was a surf rat, you know, a long haired hippie surf kid.

And, uh, and I was decent surfer.

I mean, I got into three surf movies and some magazines and that kind of stuff and a book. And, but I nearly died at 17. And, um, in the recovery of that, I was led to a little Whole Foods store and then to a yoga class who, well, at that class had a special guest speaker, Paul C. Bragg, and he lectured that night and he inspired me with his lecture to make me believe that I could, if I worked at it, overcome my learning problems and someday learn how to be intelligent.

So I assumed that intelligence was a teacher because that’s what, you know, when you’re a teenager and kid, that’s what you think. Intelligent people are teachers or something. So I had a goal and dream that I want to be a teacher. I want to be able to learn and read properly and write and speak properly.

And that led me on a journey, um, to overcome those challenges. And I eventually flew back to LA and hitchhiked back to Texas and, Took a GED to get me a high school thing, and I passed that by miracle. And then I failed school. And when I failed, I almost gave up on my dream. I thought, well, no, I guess I’m going surfing again.

And, um, something my mother said to me when she saw that I had failed, she said, son, whether you will become a great teacher and travel the world like you dream, or whether you go back to ride big waves, or you return to the streets and panhandle as a bum, just want to let you know my, your father and I are going to love you no matter what.

Thank you. When she said that my hand went into a fist and I made a commitment that I was going to learn how to read and study and learn and, and, um, teach and understand the health and philosophy and things. And philosophy became a very important thing. And, uh, I learned very shortly that the fastest way to learn besides reading.

And I was, I started memorizing a dictionary, 30 words a day. And my mom would test me on 30 words a day until I had to 20, 000 words in two years in my head. I started to Excel and I started living in the library and started reading encyclopedias and trying to catch up with all the other kids. And anytime I could learn a word, I was, it was like kid in a candy jar.

And I was interested in the universal laws, which led me to the logos, which led me to the disciplines, which led me to the philosophers, which led me to Zeno and the dialectic and led me to, you know, Hippocrates, I mean, Heraclitus, where it talked about the unity of opposites. And I just, I fell in love with philosophy.

And obviously he was involved in the, kind of the origins of Stoicism. And so I, I’ve written in that field and studied that field. And I mean, I, this has been my journey and I just, I learned it. If I teach, I learned the most. So I, I’ve been teaching now since 18 and, um, that’s what I do every single day, seven days a week, I just teach or I research, I write and I teach and I travel, I’ve delegated everything else.

I don’t do anything else. Seven days a week.

Erick: Nice. Okay. Yeah, I definitely, I definitely can relate to learning by teaching. Um, for me, when I started this podcast, like I was telling you before that it was simply a practice podcast. I was like, I want to make a podcast someday and I keep putting it off. I’m going to just create a test podcast to learn how to do it.

So that I feel comfortable with it and stoicism was what was what I was studying at the time and So I started doing that and then it got popular and so I was like, oh, this is this is cool But more than anything it was that I was learning so much about it by teaching other people about it by talking about it And sitting down and, and working through these things in my mind to the point where now I feel like it’s something that is definitely integrated into the core of who I am.

You know, everything that I see now is through a stoic lens of how can I handle this in a way that aligns with my values and my principles. And stoicism is that framework for me. And so,

John: Well, it was stoicism from what I remember was dedicated to studying universal or natural laws. What are you going to call them?

Because there were the personal anthropomorphic deity pathways and there was the impersonal. Uh, like fails, who was more of an objective, you know, scientist type, you know, and whether you called it natural laws of the universe or what they call divine laws of the universe, I didn’t matter to me. They were basically the principles that stood the test of time that we can observe in life and nature.

And to live in accordance with that was living by your divine design or living according to the logos or the plan of nature. And I was, you know, I’m very much involved in, in that thinking, um, and believe that there was a hidden order in the chaos. I never was satisfied with the idea of random, you know, thermodynamic entropic pursuits.

I was always believing there was a way of finding, go beyond that. That’s, I’ve been doing that since I was 18. Finding the hidden order, you know, is, it was, uh, the modern mathematician, Stephen Wolfram, that basically said that The difference between disorder and order is the computational boundary in our levels of algorithmic thinking.

And if we have ability to think beyond what our first senses say, um, we can, we can discern, uh, the hidden order in the chaos and come up with mathematical abstractions that are allowing us to go beyond the initial assumption that there’s some sort of disorder. And I was never satisfied with the idea that it’s all disorder.

It has to be. There has to be some meaning and reason for it. And I guess, I mean, how can a scientist even call himself a scientist or herself a scientist if they didn’t believe that there was some sort of rational order of the universe? If you would never pursue it, never waste your time looking for it.

So I guess there’s an innate part of us that has this connection to this natural order that the Stoics were referring to.

Erick: Yeah, I think for me, uh, when I, so I’m working on a book on stoicism right now, I was contacted by a publisher in the States. And so I’ve had to really dig into more of the technical aspects of stoicism.

And so I really kind of dug into logos and understanding what that was about. And for me, having grown up, I grew up Mormon, and I left the church in my thirties, um, because it never, never felt right, never seemed to fit me. And so after that, we, you know, kind of went on my own journey of finding things and then found Stoicism.

It’s like, ah, this is that framework that I’ve been looking for. So I’m very kind of anti Stoicism. I guess not anti God, but this idea of a, you know, an old white guy with a beard sitting up in the clouds, judging us for every little thing that we do or don’t do. Um, but the idea of the logos as a, as just a creative force in the universe, the animating force of why there is something rather than nothing and why, why life tends to move towards order as far as organizing into order.

beings into animals, into plants, into, you know, it’s structures that, you know, crystalline structures, those types of things. Yeah. Kind of an entry anti entropy, the idea that there’s a creative force. And so I can appreciate that. And that’s, that’s kind of their search for it. But I always found that anybody who said, well, there is a God and they were so sure of it, I’m like, you don’t know.

You honestly don’t know. I lived this way for 32 years, pretending that I believed this stuff. And then one day, once I found out, you know, stuff about it, you know, the founder of Mormonism and all the, the crap that he had done and what, how he was really just a very, he was a con man and a pedophile. And then his predecessor, not a predecessor is the guy who took over Brigham Young was even worse than him.

It was like, okay, this, this is not. God’s word, this is abuse of power. And so I was, I was able to leave in short order because it was once I’ve finally made that realization. So I went from, you know, well, believing hardcore, trying to believe hardcore too, I’m not sure what I believe too. Okay. I know I don’t believe that.

And if it was all just a matter of perception, then I don’t believe that any one religion has a monopoly on what’s really true, and then they’re all just making it up as they go along, because if I could be fooled once by that, then anybody else could be fooled by anybody else claiming these things. So, yeah, go ahead.

John: It was, uh, Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize winner, wrote The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. In 1947, he said, it’s not that we don’t know so much. We know so much that it’s so, you know, I use the analogy when you’re a young boy or girl in science class in elementary school, you probably have at the front of the class, a series of little balls from hydrogen to helium, to lithium, to beryllium, to boron, to carbon, to nitrogen, oxygen up the, up the periodic table.

And each one is a little bit larger because it has more protons, neutrons, electrons. And you see these little plastic balls and sticks in a box, and you, your frame of reference is that, that an atom is a ball. Then you go on to high school, and you get introduced to the Bohr model, and you think, no, it’s a little solar system.

It has protons and neutrons, and it’s got electrons going around it, and it’s a little solar system.

Erick: Yeah.

John: And then you go on to college, and it’s a probability distribution based on complex mathematics, the square root of negative one in Schrodinger’s equations. Yeah. And it’s probability distributions of where electrons might be with high probability of when those kind of orbitals, then you go on to get your PhD yourself.

And then you realize it’s been renormalized infinities based on infinitesimals. And these are just models that have glitches in them. And we really get really abstract. And so as the Buddha says, we had to teach them the illusion to the ready for truth.

Erick: Yes.

John: And that’s the way religions are. You have the celestial mysteries put into terrestrial histories for the personification of a deity.

So an anthropomorphic connection of human beings can relate to it. And so they have to teach them those illusions until they’re ready for truth. And the truth is so abstract, the average person IQ doesn’t comprehend it. And so it’s, it becomes a mathematical symmetry and a conservation law and the laws of nature at the highest levels.

Okay. And it transcends the personification and then anthropomorphisms or zoomorphisms that it had to go through. And so you teach them the illusion until you’re ready for truth. But those that are literate will stay at those different scales. And those that are more literate go up the scales until people are willing to pursue the great mysteries and ask the deeper questions of life.

And so I, I, I see that everything is, is a stage of awareness and, um, I’ve seen myself go through those stages in my journey and many people are at different stages and we need a social structure. So I guess that’s why they’re there. Can’t everybody be, they can’t all be CEOs of a company. They’ve got, somebody has got to have different levels of awareness.

Erick: Yeah, exactly. And I found that with myself is I’ve grown in my. spiritual, I’ll call it spiritual, but not religious, uh, journey in that finding stoicism, you know, what I first learned things they were, it was like, Oh, this is great. This, this shifts my perspective on the world in a pretty dramatic way. But in writing this book on stoicism and really digging into a lot of, like I said, some of the technical things and recognizing, you know, like the, their stress on living with virtue.

And I was like, okay, this comes up over and over and over and over and over. And it’s like, why was that so important? And really starting to internalize what it means to live. in accordance with virtue and how that changes my whole worldview and my personal worldview, meaning my whole world is how I look at the world and everything outside, but then also my, my, my local view of how I treat other people and how I’m, you know, just how I interact.

You know, just as I’m walking along rather than the bigger, grander gestures. Um, but speaking of, of quantum mechanics and stuff like that, um, kind of the opening of your book, the essentials of emotional intelligence, you kind of run through an idea, at least for me, the way that I saw it was the merging of the two ideas, or maybe the same idea, just different explanations of the logos with.

Quantum mechanics and how those two things operate. Um, it was some pretty heady stuff. Um, it’s one of those things where I was like, okay, these were a lot of ideas that I was thinking about and trying to put in. into, into a way that I could actually organize it in a way that my brain could truly understand it.

But I would have like this little bit of an idea, this little bit of an idea. And so I really appreciated that. It reminds me, um, reminds me a little bit of the theory of panpsychism in the idea that All particles have a certain level of consciousness and choice and that based upon their, their abilities, meaning what they, what they are allowed to choose or not, you know, in some it’s very simple.

You can spin this way or spin that way. And that, but there, there’s a consciousness of it and that we are just a collective conscious of all of these atoms. Is that kind of what you were going for? Or what is it? What is it about? I don’t know. This theory, and maybe you can kind of give a brief overview in a less technical way that maybe people who are listening to this might be able to, to grok a little bit better.

John: Well, it’s interesting. I was with Freeman Dyson. He passed away now, but he was at the Institute of Advanced Studies. And we had a, we’ve had three great conversations. He had made an entry into Scientific American, 1993, August edition, I believe, that was about what would happen to intelligence in the universe if it was to continue to expand according to the big bang model and go to thermodynamic equilibrium, what would happen to the, all the information.

And he said it would be stored in charged particles of light. And so I went and visited with him to have the discussion about that. How would that be? And he believed he was a panpsychic. He was a believer. That at the quantum level, these particles are making decisions, um, kind of like a Schrodinger’s, you know, box, you know, it becomes half alive or dead.

It’s making a decision to go one way or the other and decoherent instead of superposition itself. And so his idea was that I first started getting involved in going back literally to Heraclitus when he talked about the unity of opposites. Yeah. When I, when I studied his work and, and, and Parmenides who talked about being and, um, change and things of these, I thought it, could you have a pair of opposites?

Could they be unified at a higher level of abstraction? And they could be registered in our physical senses as one or the other, based on the subjective biases that we do in our interpretation, a confirmation bias and a disconfirmation bias in awareness. Thank you very much. A false positive and false negative in our perceptions.

And I’ve said that, maybe there’s a unity that underlies this apparent dichotomy. And this dichotomy isn’t really a dichotomy. It’s an apparent dichotomy. Um, but actually there’s a unity that’s entangled them. And that’s a quantum physics principle, a superposition. And then you measure it and you get something that’s entangled with the other thing.

And it’s still functioning as a unit. So I think quantum physics allows us to at least metaphorically, uh, take the observations we have in psychology, where you have elation, depression, joy, sorrow, positive, negative, which are actually inseparable from each other. I always say that depression is a comparison of your current reality to a fantasy that you’re related with.

And when life isn’t matching that fantasy, you’re depressed. But you’re holding both of them, one’s conscious, the other’s unconscious, but they’re held together in a unity. And if you know how to ask the right questions, you can reveal that unity and the inseparability of those two pairs of opposites. So the psyche, um, that’s born out of that logos, um, and you have a dialectic that’s formed, uh, a proposition and an anti proposition that’s paradoxical.

And, um, contrary pairs and that they still have a unity, they’re non dualism. So I think that that, we see that in EI ratios, excitation inhibition ratios in the brain, we see that in memory and anti memories and Neuron Magazine back in 2016, we see that in, in all homeostatic feedback systems inside physiology, Uh, there’s a unity that’s, you know, even though there’s a apparent perturbation, there’s a counterbalancing system there that’s neutralizing it.

Um, and so I could go and we could go to the subatomic particle world and we can see the emergence and submergence of particles and nanoparticles. We can go to the astronomical world and see the annihilation in black holes of stars and the birth of stars coming out of the black holes. We can see these pairs of unity of opposites at all scales of existence and in cosmology to quantum mechanics.

And it occurs inside the human psyche. So I think that that design of that unity of opposites that is all mental, which in a sense is a panpsychic expression, um, has a way of demonstrating itself at all scales. If we look at it, In sociology, we have the law of heuristic escalation, when in part of chaos theory, that anytime you have an ideologist or an ideologue that basically initiates an ideology, an equal and opposite ideology, you know, emerges simultaneously with it to counterbalance it.

And we see that on a classical collective scale, we see it inside the psyche. The second we’re infatuated with something and philic towards something, we have a phobia of its loss. And the second we’re phobic to something, we have a philic of escape. And so the, these pairs of opposites are all unified.

And if we ask the right question, we can see the unity. And I, I’ve developed methodology. It’s, I call it my method, Demartini method, uh, to help people awaken to the unity inside that opposite. Because that’s where our most authentic self is. That’s the golden mean. You might say that Aristotle said between excess and deficiency, which is the unit of opposites.

That’s, that’s the, do we have the courage to be that? Do we have the wisdom to reveal that? Do we have the temperance to be living that? And do we have the justice and prudence to be able to discern that? And that’s the virtues of the Stoics. Um, can we, can we have the transcendental awareness that young, uh, that, uh, can’t describe, um, to reveal that to ourselves and live that, you know, garbage in, garbage out.

But if we can see that we can live that. And that’s the law of nature because nature tends to have the conservation of these pairs of opposites.

Erick: Yeah. I, as I was reading your book, it was interesting to me because I really appreciated The fact that you were talking about, you know, the stoic ideal of, you know, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

And that if you can look at everything as just a neutral thing, and they’re just, there are things moving one way, things moving the other way, and, but you need both those things to keep balance because if you have one without the other, then everything gets lopsided. So, and our bodies, our minds are, are built for equilibrium because if we are too, too One thing over the other, that’s when dysfunction happens, when somebody becomes too depressed, then they get suicidal, when they don’t feel any sort, you know, if they’re always just pretending to be up, or they’re always in this elated state, that’s not helpful either, because they don’t get anything done, and so you need that balance between, and it’s that equilibrium, and our, our bodies are responsive to that, anytime that we take a pleasure hit from something, we get some dopamine, dopamine.

The body has a counter reaction to try and balance it and bring it back into alignment.

John: Hedonic adaptation and hedonic treadmill, uh, the hedonic paradox. You know, what’s interesting is if you perceive someone, um, and you’re conscious of the positives, unconscious of the negatives, and you have an impulse to seek with an infatuation or admiration that individual, you’re blind to half of it.

Your intuition is trying to whisper to you to get you back in homeostasis. You’re But you’re perturbed by it. You activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is anabolic. You didn’t want to go and consume it and eat it. You might say it’s prey. And then what happens is the parasympathetic activates epigenetic acetylation to change the protein transcriptions in the body to create symptoms.

And so the symptoms are there to let you know, as a homeostatic feedback, to let you know that you’re not seeing things as they actually are. You’re seeing things that you realize. Subjective senses. And um, so you’re not in virtue, you’re in your, you’re in your, one of your vices, you might say. An excess of positive and deficiency of negative.

Erick: Yeah. And that’s really what that, to me, I see that as kind of like, that’s really what addiction is about. Exactly.

John: That’s what addiction is. Incomplete awareness.

Erick: Yeah. That it’s a, a seeking a, a specific thing like this is, this is the thing. And then your body tries to compensate because this is too much.

This is over that line that we’re out of alignment here, which is why when people, when, you know, the, the crash up to the high is so brutal is because it’s not just that your body is missing that thing that it wants, you know, that it’s become addicted to. Yeah. Yeah. But then your body is also trying to correct and give you the opposite to bring you back into homeostasis.

And I think that’s

John: What’s interesting is it’s actually, it’s actually occurring simultaneously, but we have a lag period before we realize it. Wilhelm Wundt in 1897 wrote a book that was published, he wrote it in 1896, The Principles of Psychology. He said that there was simultaneous contrast and sequential contrast.

When people see sequential contrast, they have mood swings, cyclothymia. They go off in this direction and then they have a lag period and then they go in the other direction. And so they eventually come to homeostasis over time and that time difference is what ages us. It’s the arrow of time that separates memory and imagination and causes entropy.

But if we had simultaneous awareness of the two sides, We don’t have time oscillations. There’s the immortal, you might say. And so there’s no time if you were present. And so the quality of our life is based on the quality of the questions we ask. If we ask questions immediately upon the perception of a one sided world, and our intuition will reveal that answer.

If we ask the question, I found people even taking heroin. I’d like to work with all kinds of people.

At the moment they’re in their high and they’re in this elated experience, If I ask them the right question and get them there and get really present there, they’re already having paranoia, anxieties, and, and fears going on in their psyche, but they’re not ready to see that unless I bring it to their attention.

It’s simultaneously there, but they’re unaware of it. They’ve got a disconfirmation bias on that information, and they’re not, um, they’re not aware of it, but it’s there. So these are actually simultaneously unified, but we, with our subjective bias, blocks ourself from seeing it, As a survival mechanism. If we didn’t have that survival mechanism, we wouldn’t be able to capture prey because we need it to accelerate our body with adrenaline to capture prey or to avoid predator.

So we have to just, we have to distort things and in survival mechanisms. But once we come out of the survival mechanism, our objective mind can come back and see them simultaneous. So if I hold them accountable to see the other side and bring it to their awareness, I can take them out of the withdrawal symptoms from the drug that they think they’re taking and show them the pain in that moment.

And then the oxytocin and the anandamide and all the chemical compounds that are pleasure compounds are calmed down without even having to take, you know, to anti bring in an anti drug to do it. I can change the chemistry in the brain by asking the right questions. And all of a sudden they come off the heroin without the side effects.

Yeah. Because it’s the, it was the content in the mind. It was actually creating the neurochemistry. It wasn’t just the drug.

Erick: Yeah. Yeah. Which reminds me a lot of, uh, some of the experiments that they do with psychedelics, helping people overcome, you know, severe issues, uh, such as, you know, people who are terminally ill and taking, doing a psilocybin trip and how they were so afraid going into, you know, meaning I’m going to be dying soon and it’s terminal.

There’s nothing I can do about it. And, One or two trips of walking them through and it’s not just the drug itself, but it’s the experience and the journey that they are taken through that completely resets their mind in one, maybe two trips, and then they have no fear of death anymore because it’s changed their whole thought process and I’m sure that part of that, you know, every time we have a thought and we think through things, our brain chemistry changes slightly.

So I’m sure that If there was a way that you could measure the brain chemistry before versus after, you’d probably see a fairly dramatic shift.

John: Yeah. Our fear of death is really a fear of loss of pride and fear of loss of the fantasies that we’re holding on to. I have, I have the opportunity to take people through the grief process. I developed a method for since 1976 on that and uh, we can dissolve grief. It’s not, it’s, it’s just a neurochemistry.

You can play with it. You can alter it. So it’s basically asking questions, make them cognizant of things they were unconscious of, balance out the equation. And all of a sudden they’re neutral again. We only fear the loss of things we infatuate with. We only fear the gain of things we resent. If we’re completely neutral, we don’t have the fear of loss or fear of gain.

We just have the ability to transform. I always said a master lives in a world of transformation and the masters live in the illusions of gain and loss.

Erick: Interesting. It reminds me of, uh, when I was a kid, I’d watch the old kung fu movies and you see, you know, the young student who was all like aggression and, you know, he’s going to kill, he’s going to do it.

He’s just, and he’s just go, go, go, go, go. You see the Zen master who is just walking along, peaceful, placid, and anybody who attacks him, you know, with anger, he just uses that anger against them. And I always thought that was so fascinating. And like, how would you develop a mindset like that? And so that, that ability to look at things neutrally, like allows you to look at things purely objectively, I guess, in a Vulcan sort of way of, okay, what this person is saying, what they’re doing, it’s just words coming out of their mouth, you know, and the Storks were great about that, about breaking things down to their most constituent components.

This person made vocal sounds with their vocal cords that came out of their mouth towards me. You know, at the, at his fundamental level, that’s what, what it would be if somebody was shouting or yelling at you or swearing at you. And so when you can look at it through that lens, then it takes all the emotion out of it.

Then you can go, okay, now I can look at what my judgment was about those sounds that were, that were uttered out of their, their vocal cords.

John: There was a friend of mine who was a interesting teacher. And he had this student who was very infatuated with this attractive woman. He thought, and the teacher said, he, the student said, I, I can’t get her out of my mind.

I I’m, I’m obsessed by her. I have intrusive thoughts. I can’t sleep. I’m so in love with her and infatuated with her. And he said, just see your girlfriend now, take her hair and put it over here, take out her teeth and put them over here. Now take out our balls, eyeballs, eyeballs and put them here. Take her intestines and put them over here and take her, her skin and lay it over here.

And all her bones are laid out over here. And just reframe the entire perception, broke it down into these parts. And, uh, when you reduce it like that into its parts, it has different associations that you make bones. Skin, take all the blood, put that in a little, a little bowl . And all of a sudden he was like, okay, I’m not infatuated with her anymore.

’cause he made associations that have the downsides to counterbalance the upsides. And then he was able to be thinking more clearly again instead of infatuation. ’cause you’re infa, you’re blind by the infatuation.

Erick: Absolutely. I, I remember as a teenager and even as an adult, you know, being so infatuated with somebody, thinking the world of them.

And I think that, um, in my long term relationships, it definitely caused issues because this is one of the things that I wanted to get on. I have here. My notes was what I put down as the pedestal in the pit and I really love that imagery because. With my last long term relationship, I definitely put her up on a pedestal, which was very unfair to her and to me because I always felt like I was unworthy in that relationship and I was always trying to get her to love me and so for a long, and that was probably the biggest downfall of our relationship was that because of my own past trauma, I didn’t believe that that somebody could truly love me for who I was.

And so anytime she was annoyed, frustrated, angry with me, my brain interpreted to that, see, she doesn’t love you. And so then I would get more and more angry because I would be saying, you know, because I was desperate for her to love me. And she was trying to, she was honestly trying to, and my ex wife the same way.

They were both trying to love me, but I wouldn’t let them because I couldn’t believe that they would because What I finally figured out here, you know, in the last couple of years was that I didn’t think that I was worthy of love. So therefore they couldn’t love me. And so I had to, I had to work through that.

John: Anytime you’re in a relationship and you’re too humble to admit what you see in them inside you, even though you actually have those behaviors inside you, but you’re too humble to admit it. You’re blind to it. You’ll put them on a pedestal, minimize yourself, inject their values in your life, attempt to live in their values for fear of loss of them, sacrifice what’s important to you, but they don’t feel they have a match.

And the underdog wants monopoly and wants to close the deal and bring them down and say, let’s get married. The overdog, not the underdog wants to keep the options open because they don’t feel they’ve got a match. And they want somebody that can not fear the loss, you know, or when you’re an underdog, you’re afraid to say negative things.

When you’re the overdog, you’re afraid to say positive things because you don’t want to mislead them because you know that this is not a match.

Erick: Yeah.

John: But nature forces them into it. You get angry and eventually come up, she gets humbled or she leaves. And then you get to learn that you’re not here to find somebody that you’re admiring.

And put on a pedestal, you’re here to find somebody to put in your heart, not on the pedestal, not in the pit, because either one of those will create symptoms to get you back into the heart.

Erick: Absolutely. And I, what I love about that is that in your book, you talked about by understanding the kind of the pedestal in the pit and trying to find that equilibrium.

Then you look at all people that way with that kind of equilibrium. You, you do your best to not be overly infatuated with somebody you think is amazing or to hate somebody that you don’t like some of the things about them and Oftentimes, as you know, we all know, usually the things you don’t like about other people are things you don’t like about yourself.

John: Not always. It’s a reflection of what you

Erick: Yeah, not always for sure. But I think

John: I’ve taken a hundred and twenty I’ve taken a hundred and twenty five thousand people, and I have them every week in my breakthrough experience. I say, okay, give me the person that you resented most in your life.

Erick: Yeah.

John: They all find the person that they resent.

I said, write down the number one specific trait, action, or inaction that you perceive that they displayed or demonstrated that you presented the most. And they’ll say whether they’re verbally critical, or they’re evasive, or they lied, or they did this, or whatever it is. And I have them write it down. Now, I’ll go to a moment where, and when you perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating that same specific trait, action or inaction that you admired or despised in them.

Okay. Oh, I swear I never do that. I pride myself on never doing that. They try to dodge it. I say, look again. And I make them look and look and look and look. Until they go, Oh yeah, in this case, I did it here and here and here and here. And I’m making them keep looking until the quantity and quality is equal.

And then they realize that the only reason they resent people on the outside is it because they represent on the outside parts of them they’re ashamed of on the inside that they’ve dissociated from and built up a false pride to protect themselves. And they want to be around that person because it reminds them of what they don’t love about themselves.

Yeah. And so that person that they’re presenting is the teacher to try to wake ’em up, to love that part of themselves and reintegrate that part. They’ve just summed.

Erick: Yeah.

John: And when they, when they do that, they love the person and then they’re not even resent. ’cause it had nothing to do with what the person did.

Yeah. It was everything to do with how they perceived it.

Erick: Yeah. A good example of that, in my case, there was this guy back in Portland, um, he always hit on my girlfriend and on my ex-partner. And it just, it really annoyed me and there were just a lot of things about it. Um, and I told her one time, you know, I’m like, uh, he really just, he really gets under my skin and, and she just turned and looked at me and she goes, Oh, that’s interesting.

And she’s like, but you know, our other friend will hit on me from time to time. Why doesn’t that bother you? I’m like, well, because I trust him and like him and this guy just, and she goes, well, the funny thing is you two are so much alike. And I was like, I am not like him. And then she’s like, think about it.

You, you are, I want you to think about that. And then I was like, okay, well, he does kind of remind me of my younger brother. There’s some things that my younger brother does, which would annoy me. And so I’m like, so I guess I can see those similarities, which then led me to kind of piece through. I’m like, oh, okay.

Oh yeah. He does that thing, which, Um, and so I started being much more aware of that, which made me much more forgiving of that and much more easy, better to accept that. But then also around the same time, he got a new partner who really pointed out a lot of the things that he did that were just. You know, just by the way, these are things you do and it may be off putting to other people.

And he’s like, I do? Because he was kind of unaware of those things as well. And over time, we actually got to be pretty good friends because I was able to just accept that, yeah, some of those things that I don’t like about you, I, yeah, they’re things that I do or have done or think about doing, or, or they’re behaviors that I used to do, but I’ve curbed them, but they are kind of part of who I am anyway.

I’m just I’m, I’m holding them back and shutting them down because they’re not acceptable in certain circles. And so, yeah,

John: Social injection. Exactly. And so it was injection. And we, we think we’re supposed to be a certain way by this moral hypocrisy that we’ve been entrained by. You know, I went to the auction English dictionary 40 years ago.

Once I realized that what I saw in others is a reflection of me and real true authenticity is the willingness to own it all. And quit trying to pretend you don’t have those traits. So I went to the Oxford English dictionary 40 years ago, and I looked and underlined every known human behavioral trait I could find in there.

I found 4, 628 traits. And then I put out on the outside margin, who do I know displays that trait to the highest degree. And I put their little initials and their name. And then I went inside to one by one, this is how neurotic I am at times. I went one by one and identified where and when I displayed that behavior until it was equal to the person that I thought was the most extreme.

And I just kept digging and digging. And when I got to a point where I realized it was them, the people that had those behaviors no longer pushed my button because I already owned it. We only get our buttons pushed with admiration or despise To the degree that we disown the trait that we see in them.

Once we realize that, and we can own it and see the upsides and the downsides equally, we have equanimity within ourself relative to all those behaviors. We can now be our whole self and quit trying to get rid of some part of ourselves and gain some part of ourselves, which is futile.

Erick: Yeah. One of the things that I found interesting, um, for me, And maybe you can kind of comment on this and we were talking about, um, that acceptance of others really helps us to accept ourselves.

I,

I had a blow up with my ex partner. This is about three, three and a half years ago, and I was really, really hurt by it. I, she, she had done something which, you know, talking to anybody else, like, yeah, that was really hurtful. Um, and I was furious with her and I was, You know, getting into an argument about it over and over and over, and I was just like, I could not let it go.

And I was like, when I, when we finally got home, we’d been on a, we’d been at a festival camping. Um, it took a week and just really, I was like, why did that hurt so much? Why does this bother me so much? Why can’t I be very stoic about this? And what I came to find out was that I felt like I needed her validation to be a good person.

That if she was upset with me, annoyed with me, frustrated, that I told me that I was a bad person. I’m like, okay, if that’s the case, then why do I feel like I’m a bad person that I need somebody to tell me I’m okay? And I was like, that’s interesting. So I, I sat down and I thought, what is it about me that is so bad that I don’t think I’m a good person?

And so I was like, that’s a really good question. What is it? So I sat down and wrote down everything I didn’t like about myself, all the things that, you know, just, and I basically, you know, and those are the things that we’d never really want to look at because we don’t want to, we don’t want to face that monster.

We don’t want to see those things. Because they feel incredibly scary, they feel incredibly vulnerable. And when I did that, I just listed out everything I didn’t like about myself and then I went back and looked at the list. And it was kind of like, I had this moment of like, Huh, there’s nothing on here that’s really all that bad.

Like, my friends struggle with these things. And if my friend came to me with this list and said, Hey, this is all the bad shit about me, I would have just been like, okay, I already know, you know, yeah, I know you do these things and I still love you and accept you. So I’m like, so why can’t I do that for myself?

And for me, that was such a huge turning point because it was like, it was kind of like, I never really wanted to look at those things because in my brain, it was a scary monster. It’s kind of like seeing the flitting. Shadow out of the corner of your eye and thinking it’s a monster because you can’t get a clear view of it.

But then you turn around and look and it’s just a shadow coming off a tree from the moonlight or something like that. And so when I do that exercise with people, it’s fascinating for me. When I say I want you to sit down and write down all the things you don’t like about this yourself. Just almost, almost invariably, there’s this look of horror like, Oh, I could never do that.

And I find that just incredibly fascinating. And I think that we’re go ahead.

John: You know, I, about, oh gosh, 40 years ago, again, I gave up that illusion, the moral hypocrisy. So we’re taught from our grandmothers and parents and things like that. Be nice. Don’t be mean, be kind, don’t be cruel, be positive. Don’t be negative, be generous.

Don’t be stingy, be giving, don’t be taking, be peaceful. Don’t be wrathful. All one sided hypocrisies. No human being is that. I’m not a nice person. I’m a not a mean person. Those are personas. I’m an individual human being with a set of values. When you support my values, I’m nice as a pussycat. When you challenge my values, I’m mean as a tiger.

As long as I’m addicted to nice, mean’s going to hurt.

Erick: Yeah.

John: As long as I’m addicted to one side, I’m going to be subjected from the other. And if one is associated with pleasure, the other is going to be associated with pain because it’s a separation of pairs of opposites. And the mind tries to add space and time to the authentic self, the unity of opposites and separate the inseparables and divide the indivisibles and label the unlabelables and names the inevitables and polarizes the unpolarizables and makes us think we should get rid of half of that.

And I tell people, if you’re trying to get rid of half of yourself, you never love yourself because all of it is needed. All parts. The idea of a shadow side is really an illusion. Because we’re, what is the shadow in, in, in, uh, in Africa, the former Zuma, uh, Jacob Zuma was the president of South Africa at nine wives in America.

You go to prison for it. So is he evil? And this is now it’s evil here, but it’s good. They’re tribally. That’s good. You’re powerful.

You wouldn’t want a leader that didn’t have that power. And so these are moral traps, moral paradoxes, moral hypocrisies, That are used by, you might say, oppressors over the oppressed.

Anytime an oppressor has had their values challenged, they set up a rule to prevent them from actually growing, and honoring the parts of themselves. And then they put it into a system, and then it gets passed down as moral hypocrisy. And then we get trapped in these ideas about one sidedness. And the truth is, there’s nothing really to get rid of.

There’s nothing to seek. There’s nothing to avoid. There’s something to love. And it’s not even about acceptance, because we go through this idea that we’ve got to accept that part of ourselves. Well, that’s sort of saying that it’s not what I really want. But it’s appreciating those sides. You need to, those sides are necessary.

If somebody comes up to you and says, Boy, I’m about to kill your daughter, Um, and there’s a gun there, a knife there, and they’re about to stab your daughter and you grab the knife and you think you can pull it off and get rid of them before they get rid of your daughter. You probably have a situational ethic where you’re going to say, well, maybe in this case, aggression has a value.

So situational ethics are going to make us come to the edge and boundary of our own bias and allow us to embrace all parts of ourselves. And if you try to repress it and suppress it, unconsciously or unconsciously, you’re going to attract the person, the villain to make you come out with it, to teach you how to love all parts of yourself.

Erick: Yeah. I think the reason that I had to start with acceptance was because the idea of liking or loving it was too much. And so I started with that, just accepting that this is reality. This is, these are things about me, but again, nothing on it was so awful that I looked at it and went, Oh, I can’t accept that.

And so when I work with people to get them over their own, like, you know, uh, recoiling of it, using the word acceptance is much easier. Can you just accept the

John: starting point?

Erick: Yeah. And then, and then that starts that integration process of, yeah. Okay. I can be selfish sometimes. I’m not a selfish person, but I can be selfish.

I can be rude. I can be angry. I can be hypocritical. Okay. I can accept those things. I’m all those things. And so what that does is that allows you so that when you are acting in a way that is hypocritical, it doesn’t really align with your values or your you’re being selfish in a way that doesn’t truly align with your values.

And somebody points it out, you can go, you know what, I can be selfish sometimes. So then you can actually look at it and go, yeah, you know what, I was being selfish at this time. It allows you to take ownership of those things. And that for me was really fascinating. Yeah, but the thing is,

John: I, I’ve been studying values 46 years and I assure that the values that we say that we’re afraid of breaking, they’re not ours.

They’re the injected values of mothers, fathers, preachers, teachers, conventions, traditions of morays. That have been based on a, an assumption that one side’s better than the other, but the real actual you is not judging it. It’s the, the, the superego is Freud called it, which is the injected value of an outer authority that you subordinated to, that you fear the loss of starting with mommy.

That has inculcated into your consciousness. And that’s the part that’s judging it. You’re just a human being with both sides. And we go through and we get in this, this socialization, this conventionalization inside us as we go through life. As Kohlberg says, we start out with reward and punishment. We go to pre conventional association, mothers and fathers, and then we go up the ladder until we eventually get to transcendence.

And we abide by the laws of the universe, which transcends the moral hypocrisies that most societies are trapped in.

Erick: Yeah, yeah, I can definitely see that. So do you think that the stoic virtues So wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, do you think that those are then things that I guess attributes, if you will, or, I mean, I guess they’re virtues that transcend the duality, the dual side of it, because there are things that are moderated ones.

And okay. Because for me, I was thinking of it. I was thinking about that and I was like, okay, so these are values that you don’t have to divorce one from the other because they are, I guess they contain both sides or they’re in the middle?

John: They’re, they’re the middle. That’s why Aristotle said it’s the golden mean, the true virtue is the golden mean between access and deficiency of perception.

If we look at where our voids, see our voids determine our values and our voids come from anything we’re too proud or too humble to admit that we see in outside things inside ourselves. So anytime we judge and we think, well, I’m too humble or too proud to admit what I see in you inside me, I have a disowned part.

That empty disowned part from the judgment drives the values And our highest value where we’re most objective is the most efficient, effective pathway to fulfill the greatest amount of voids with the greatest amount of value. That’s why it’s fulfilling. And that is where temperance is. That’s the center point.

That’s where true wisdom is, which is the synthesis of opposites. The dialectic is wisdom, the pursuit of epistemological true knowledge. And that is also the courage to be oneself, the courage to be oneself in a society that’s trying to make you one sided. The courage to be nice, mean, as Machiavelli says in the Prince, you know, I’m, I have to be nice and mean and kind and cruel.

And Nietzsche says, I have to be the virtuous, I’m the most virtuous and the most vicious. I have to own all that if I want to be authentic. And so then there’s prudence. The prudence is to know when to use which one and then justice is to bring it back into balance. So those are the trends of dentals that have been the four cardinal pillars of the, of the Stoics and the Greeks at the time.

Erick: Yeah, interesting, because I wanted, you know, it, because I had wondered for quite a while of why they settled on those four. And for me, What I came to understand is the, that they’re interconnected with each other. They each support each other and because you can’t have wisdom. Yeah, you can’t have wisdom without courage because you gain wisdom through being courageous and doing things.

That developing that self awareness, uh, seeking knowledge. Being willing to be thought of as a fool because you don’t know anything And so it takes courage to gain wisdom But to be courageous and also it takes wisdom because you have to know how to be courageous You have to know when to stand up and when to retreat Uh, it takes, you know, injustice, how you treat other people.

Well, it takes wisdom to know how to treat other people. It takes courage to stand up for what is right when it comes to how you treat other people. And then temperance is the bow that wraps all around that.

John: When we’re infatuated with somebody. And we’re conscious of the upsides and unconscious downsides that we fear their loss.

When we’re resentful to somebody and we’re conscious of the downsides, unconscious of the upsides, both with subjective biases, we fear their gain. When we’re completely neutral, transcendent, not attached, the middle path, moksha, liberation, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. We’re in the center.

We’re not attached. We don’t fear the loss. We don’t fear the gain. That’s the temperate path. That’s the moderation. That’s the golden virtue. And that means we don’t have the fear of loss. We don’t have the fear of gain. We’re not living in fear. That was what courage meant. Courage meant the heart, in the center, in the heart.

Erick: The cour

We had to be able to be heartful and we can’t open a heart. As long as we have parasympathetic activity and we have bradycardia or sympathetic activity, we get tachycardia. And we get a delta waves or beta waves. We don’t get alpha theta waves and gamma synchronicities in the brain, which opens the heart with Eureka moments of inspiration.

We’re not authentic. So nature is bringing us back to the center. All, all of our physiology, psychology, sociology, even our theologies are feedback mechanisms to get us to be authentic in the heart, to have the wisdom and the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love. And that’s what philosophy was about.

That’s what the Stoics were trying to say. And that’s a non attached, non judgmental, neutral individual that’s able to see both sides simultaneously and realize it’s all reflection of me. And everything’s a test to find out whether you’ve honored your own parts. Because if you don’t react, that means you’ve honored your parts.

You’ve been objective about the truth of life, the logos. If not, you’re in pathology. And you’re in non resilient, non adaptability, the maladaptive state of the, of the bias, which makes us our own nature, the affections as Aristotle said. So we, we can trap in our impulses and instincts so we can be awakened through our intuitions and inspirations.

So why do you think that most people stay in their illusions? Why they, why they don’t work for that transcendence that they They take what’s given to them and just go, yep, this is how it is. And don’t, don’t seek that. Or do you think that most people are seeking that they just don’t know where to look?

John: Thousands of years ago, possibly millions, humans were supposedly nomadic and they were generalist and they had to, you know, fend for themselves. And. And then kinship developed and then township developed and then communities and state cities and then states and sedentary division of labor, economic systems, markets started developing, people became dependent on specialties and they couldn’t function on their own.

Right now, if we were to go out in wild nature, most of us wouldn’t survive. So we became more and more dependent and therefore fitting into society and conforming to society became stronger. And yet we stagnate. If we don’t have some renegade maverick that comes in and stimulates a new thinking, we have to have the renegade.

Ernest Becker in his denial of death, talked about the immortality quotients, the collective reality or the individual hero mentality. And do we have the courage to walk an individual path to make a difference? Or do we just fit into society before the fear and we just want to fit in with our mirror neurons?

Most people would rather fit in and not be rejected and want to be accepted. Very few people have the ability to walk an unborrowed visionary path, blaze a new trail, uh, set a new idea, be ridiculed, violently opposed until it becomes self evident and change the world. But it requires a few of those.

Can’t have everybody like that, but we can have a few. And the ones that do, they leave their mark as immortals. The people that don’t, they, they faded into oblivion because they were just fitting into the thing. If you ask people, how many want to make a difference in the world, everybody puts a hand up, but how are you going to make a difference fitting in?

You’re going to make a difference standing out. Few people have the courage, the wisdom, the temperance, the prudence to stand out. Those were the great philosophers and thinkers of the times, the innovators, the polymaths, the geniuses, the Renaissance people that were able to be the misfits as Jobs calls them.

Erick: Yeah, I thought about that. Yeah, I thought about that at one point, that We need people to throw monkey wrenches at times because that’s how things change because otherwise the status quo is, is going to hold like what Gandhi did, what Martin Luther King Jr. Did they, they were like, yeah, we have this status quo and it ain’t working.

It works for some people, but it doesn’t work for all of us. And they wanted to see that change. And so we need, and so it occurred to me, sometimes we need those people to come in and throw in a monkey wrench. Otherwise we’re not going to make progress. We’re going to stay how we are.

John: That’s why we need this side called the shadow.

It’s not a shadow.

It’s just another part of ourself that we must have in order to master our life.

Erick: That’s

John: why I don’t, that’s why I don’t even use, except I just say appreciation for all parts of ourself. What other people, there’s a spectrum of values out there from one extreme to the other, like synonyms and antonyms. And there’s always going to be supporters and challengers and heroes and villains.

And there’s always going to be people that like and dislike. And that’s just inevitable. The question is, is can you love yourself with regardless of all those opinions projected on you? And know they’re all true under different context. For instance, if it, I have a very high value on teaching and research.

And I love that. I do it every day. But somebody has a very high value on children and being here with the kids and having dinner every day and everything else. Would look at me and say, well, you’re a terrible father. You don’t see your kids every day. And, and they would, in the context of their projection, that would be totally true.

I’m a terrible father,

Erick: Mmm hm

John: somebody else would say, wow, you’re such a good father because you’re teaching them these principles and everything else. And I could, I could easily be swayed by people’s opinions, but a people’s opinions of the cheapest commodities on earth and those that circulate the most usually have the least values.

They’re usually the ones that go viral. The real true masters, Sometimes their opinions are only in the hands of the masters. You know, that if you go put a great principle out in the market, it doesn’t go viral. It has to be sensational and ridiculous to go viral in most cases. And so it’s, it’s, I don’t go by what people’s opinions, I go by what the calling is in life.

When the voice and the vision on the inside is louder than all opinions on the outside, you’ve begun to master your life. You know, in my contempt for authority made anyone, says Einstein. And Emerson says the, you know, envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide. We have to be willing to walk a path that’s our own unique path based on what’s valuable and do it in a way that serves people and, and, and, and honor a way of expressing what you value in terms of other people’s values.

Cause they’re not wrong either. They’re necessary in the, in the giant cosmic picture. And the puzzle piece and they’re just as valued. And if you have equanimity within yourself and equity between you and them, you can communicate respectfully your uniqueness in terms of theirs. And then they all of a sudden can help you fulfill what it is you’d love to do, even though they may have a different pathway.

Erick: Yeah. That was an interesting thing that you said in your book, um, had it written down here, it was, uh, understanding the, uh, how did you put it? Uh, communicating your highest values in terms of the other people’s highest values. Can you just delve into that just a little bit more? Cause I liked that idea, but I didn’t, it’s like, I get it.

And then I’m like, I think I got it. No, I don’t. So if you could dig into that, I’d appreciate it.

John: So every human being has a set of priorities and set of values that they live their life by. And if you look carefully at how they fill their space, what they spend their time on, what energizes them, what they spend their money on.

What is it that’s most organized in their life? Where they’re most disciplined in life? What do they think, visualize and internal dialogue with themselves about most, about how they want their life to be, that’s showing evidence of coming true. What they converse with other people about spontaneously and love talking about, what inspires them and brings tears to their eyes.

What is it that there’s the most consistent, persistent goals that they pursue that are coming true? And what is it they spontaneously want to learn about? Those give objective feedback on what is really important and valuable to that individual. Cause their life demonstrates that. You ask people their values, they’ll tell you all kinds of crazy idealisms.

But if you look at what they’re like, yeah, if you look at what their life demonstrates, you get an idea of what they’re committed to. My life is teaching. I do it seven days a week. So it’s hard, not, it’s not hard to see what I’m up to. But once you find out what’s highest on an individual’s values, and then you ask the question, how is this individual?

With this high set of values, this set of values, this top one, how specifically in them being dedicated to that, helping me fulfill what I’m dedicated to, my highest value. If you ask that question and hold yourself accountable to answer it 30 times, you’ll be brought to a tier of gratitude for the, for the magnificence of that individual in your life.

If you then go and ask how specifically is what I’m completely dedicated to helping them fulfill their value, You may never have done that. You may never even seen it. But once you ask the question, hold yourself accountable, you see it. The moment you do the dialogue between the two people now becomes respectful.

It’s not an alternating monologue where one speaks, the other one listens. They both are now in dialogue. And I did this in Tokyo. I had 66 people, a little experiment. They didn’t know each other, never met each other. We determined their values, which is on my website on how to do that. We determined their values.

It took about 30, 40 minutes. And then we did a linking for two hours out of the 66 people, 33 couples, 27 of them were in business with each other that month. Wow. Because they respected, they communicated, they articulated what they valued in terms of the other person’s value spontaneously. Without having to fake it without having to appease without having to minimize themselves.

Cause if you minimize yourself to their values, you’re going to altruistically sacrifice for them until you eventually resent that because you go, that’s not fair to me. If you go the other way and you start down to them and try to get them to live in your values, eventually they will walk away because, and you’ll get humbled.

But if you learn to communicate your values in terms of their values, you’ll have equanimity, sustainable, fair exchange, and maximum utility. And that’s where the maximum accomplishment and fulfillment comes.

Erick: Yeah, I can definitely see that. That’s interesting. Um, because I have an example of that kind of happening for me right now.

Um, I’m moving into coaching and leadership training, uh, from a startup perspective in tech. And I had one of my listeners contact me on LinkedIn and she’s like, Hey, I work for Google and I’d really like you to come and speak to us. And, you know, let’s, let’s get this going. And I was, you know, and she is going out of her way to help me.

Get into this and move into, you know, working with, with them, you know, at a degree that it’s almost like I’m paying her, like she’s an employee and that’s her job, but she’s doing it out of love because she’s like, you, your podcast has given me so much. And I understand it’s value to a degree that I can’t even express.

You helped me through a big, through some really tumultuous times in my life. And you paid it forward to me, you have blessed me. And now it’s my turn to do that. And I know how valuable you are. And I want to spread that value to other people. And it’s, it’s insane. I was just like, you know, to have somebody believe in me that much and want to support me that much and go out of her way that much.

Has just been, it’s just been an amazing feeling. And a part of me is just like, this almost feels unreal is like, where’s the camera, but it’s just been wonderful.

John: You have heroes and villains and supporters and challengers. They always come in pairs like opposites. And I, if I see one, I get elated. If I see the other one, I get depressed.

If I see both simultaneously, I get present and I get authentic. So I don’t allow the people that puff me up to buff me up. I don’t allow the people that knock me down to knock me down. I learned to ask where’s the opposite side. I find it. And then I’m centered. If you don’t govern yourself from within, you get governed from without.

People that govern themselves within are the leaders. People that govern from without are the followers. So it’s our, it’s our own responsibility to look carefully at both sides simultaneously. As Wilhelm once said, the moment we do, we liberate ourselves from the distractions of other people’s opinions.

Erick: Yeah. Interesting. I wonder where the opposite of this is coming, or if, or if maybe that I’m, I’m the person. Yeah.

John: Yeah. Look, no, no. Look outside at that exact moment. Look at who was withdrawn from you and thinking that it’s, uh, you’re not helping them, et cetera. You’ll find that they’re always paired. The moment you do it’s in that exact synchronous moment.

That’s what synchronistic boxes is. It’s, that’s the anti memory of the brain. It’s there. If you study anti memories in Neuron Magazine, March 17th, 2016, there’s a great article in Neuron Magazine and the derivatives of that on the anti memory, that the second you have a memory of something, your brain will create a real or virtual anti memory to keep the EI ratios, excitation inhibition ratios in the brain balanced and will create the other side and make you aware of the other side and people around you to make sure you stabilize yourself.

That’s a homeostatic mechanism.

Erick: Interesting. Because I do think that there was a part of me which is like, like I said, almost disbelieving. Like, this is too good to be true. But that’s a

John: Well, that’s your, that’s your intuition working. Because anytime somebody tries to puff you up above equilibrium, your intuition is going to point out the downsides by the moral licensing effect.

Moral licensing effect. The second you go into pride, it automatically makes you do things that are a shame to keep you back in equilibrium. And the moment you go into shame, it makes you do things that are proud, humbly to get you back in equilibrium. So you, that’s a normal thing, but there’s also on the outside of balancing act.

And when we see that we’re untouched by the illusions of the outside world.

Erick: Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about kind of the opposite things on that, but I did find that what I appreciate about her. So we had dinner last night when she was in town and she, she was very pragmatic about it.

It was, she wasn’t like puffing me up and like this big, Oh, you’re, you’re all these things. It’s just like, what you’ve done has really, truly, and honestly helped me. It was, it was said very humbly. And so I, I, you know, I believed her. She’s just like, you know, you know, she wasn’t saying, Oh, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.

She was just saying what you have given out in the world. was so valuable to me. I, and I have the ability and the resources and the connections to be able to pay that back. Plus, I think that what you can do can help lots of other people. So I’m getting something out of this because I like helping other people and you are a tool that I can use to help other people.

And you can shine lights on things that they don’t understand and help them with their perspectives on the world. So I’m getting something from this too.

John: You can help her. Geez. There’s no altruist. There’s no narcissist. Those are labels. It’s just human beings that are compensating for either pride or shame of the past, neutralizing it with these behaviors.

And so if she’s getting some agenda out of it, something met by helping other people, she’s helping you, but she’s also helping herself or she wouldn’t do it. No one moves a muscle without a motive consciously or unconsciously in a way where they win. Yeah. I’ve been to this warrant against. He said, don’t be fooled by what people do when they do something they think is that you think is terrible.

They wouldn’t do it to be terrible. They would do it because they think it’s to their advantage or they think it’s good in their view.

Erick: Yeah. And basically the idea that people only sin out of ignorance, if you will, you know, they only do something because they don’t understand or we don’t understand.

John: And even sin is a questionable thing.

If you study moral philosophy,

Erick: For sure. I’m using that colloquially.

John: That’s an absolutist view instead of a relativist view because situational ethics can easily take every sin and turn it into something that’s useful.

Erick: Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, that’s very, very true. Um, and it’s, it’s hard to be absolute just on everything because you can always come up with edge cases.

And I, having worked in software for years, that was the killer was that you created a tool that could do all of these things, but then you had to deal with the edge cases. And sometimes there could be myriad edge cases where you’re going, okay, well, yeah. Worked out all of these things and then suddenly something pops up and you’re like, ah, one more.

Okay, I have to add that in. And coding for edge cases can sometimes take longer than coding for what takes care of 95 percent of your problem. That 5 percent can be almost equal to the 95%.

John: Exactly. They know that under consequentialism that, um, no matter what you do, nobody knows the total consequences of it.

So we don’t know really what are consequences of any of our actions. So if we narrow our mind and say that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s only because we haven’t taken the time to look at all the consequences.

Erick: Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s an interesting idea. I like that, that, that when we make a judgment about something, it’s simply because we can’t see the full context of all the consequences.

John: If we saw that we, as a, in a central limit theorem of probability statistics, you know that as you increase the sample size, you increase The probability of a mean, the mean in the bell curve, the mean distribution of positive and negatives. So if we look very carefully on a blog, we see somebody attacking us, let’s say, or supporting us or something.

And then it’ll go back and forth with support and challenge. And there’ll be people counterbalancing each other in a dialectic. And eventually you realize that it’s good and bad. I did a magazine, newspaper, article, should I stay or should I leave in South Africa one time? And there were, I think 9, 000 comments after the article.

And, uh, we, we measured them all out. And some said, I, if you come into our country, I’m going to personally kill you on, on one of them. Another one said, we want you to run for president on another one. And I took everyone that slanted positive and negative. We added them all up and they were balanced. So I don’t pay attention to people’s perspective because they always play in a balancing act.

You cannot make it to the highest levels of life unless you’re the hero and the villain. And if you can’t honor your hero and villain, don’t expect to rise to the top. That’s the way life is. If we look at all the great leaders, you know that they’re heroes and villains and people’s and different people’s perspectives.

Erick: Yeah. That’s interesting because for me, one of the things that I’ve, I’ve, I’ve steered away from any personal, strong, personal political opinions on my podcast, um, for a number of reasons. One, because I’m trying to reach a broad audience, but, um, when I have like during COVID, what’s that?

John: I said, you’re too wise to be caught in those trivias.

Erick: Yeah. I mean, so like during COVID, I, I, one of my episodes I talked about is, and I mentioned, if you are not You know, getting the vaccine or wearing your masks when you’re outside at the height of the of the crisis, then you’re being selfish. You’re not taking into account how your behaviors can impact other people in a very profound way.

You could get your grandma killed if you’re being stupid about this stuff. And I had a couple of people writing to me and the vaccines are all a scam. And, you know, like, how dare you bring politics into your podcast? And it was just, you know, It was, I found it very amusing because I’m like, this isn’t a political thing.

This is a health thing. This is a responsibility thing. This is proven science that if you wear a mask, your chances of getting other people sick drop dramatically. It’s just common sense. You know, because you’re not spitting stuff out when you’re talking. And it, it kind of surprised me because there were just two episodes where I mentioned certain things like that, and those were the only real negative comments I got, otherwise, like pretty much all of them been pretty positive.

But. There are times when I struggle with that because I see, I see what happens in politics and I see where there, there are certain people who definitely, I think are very dangerous and can cause a lot of damage to a lot of people because, you know, You know, because of their agendas and there’s a part of me which wants to speak up and kind of point out about those things, but I’m not really in politics.

So it’s like, is it, is it worth it to step up and do that? But I also want people to think about those things. I want them to not just follow blindly. I want them to challenge that. So am I better off just talking about philosophy, talking about how to manage your perceptions, how to work through those types of things so that you aren’t fooled by people and that you can make choices that are for the greater good.

So that’s kind of, that’s a struggle I have at times of wading into anything controversial because, you know, then there’s also the stoics admonition. You don’t have to have an opinion about it.

John: Well, uh, if you look in my books, uh, you’ll find out that I take out all imperatives, all absolutes. None of them are allowed to be published in the books that I do because you take a stance, you create an obvious stance.

You take a side, you create an opposite side. Um, that’s the law of heuristic escalation that automatically occurs in sociology. Mm-Hmm. . And that’s the unity of opposites. That’s why the dtic is there. That’s why proposition and anti propositions were designed. The thesis and antithesis were designed. So to expect to do one, take a side, you’ll automatically get the reaction.

The more you take the side, the more the reaction. So I’m, I’m a side list guy on that. I, I just, I find that that’s. not the wisest use of time because you just get bogged down in trivia of arguments. And there’s a thing called the dialectic. And there’s a thing called debate debate was to persuade people into right and wrong.

I’m right. You’re wrong. And the dialectic was to both learn from each other to gain the wisdom of the synthesis, the synthesis, and the wisdom of the synthesis was the path of wisdom. Um, but we, we tend to go sideways instead of vertically. And the, uh, Into the synthesis and we take a side and the opposite side.

So I don’t waste my time on that because it’s, it’s a pointless debate. See if people want to debate me, I said, I have no interest in debating. Cause then you want to be right. And I, I’m not interested in debating. I’m interested in dialectic and having a conversation and I can share things. You can share things.

We both grow from it. But I’m not interested in being right. Cause I don’t want to be right. I don’t want to be wrong. I just want to be me.

Erick: Yeah, yeah, I think that that’s very true. And I think that I, and maybe that’s why I have steered away from that is because what I’m trying to impart is more universal principles rather than here’s my agenda and I want you to be on my side.

You know, it’s more of just like, Hey, I don’t care what side you’re on. If you can live these principles, then we can all start to meet in the middle and we don’t have to be on one side or the other. And that’s what I think. Okay. Yeah. No, thanks.

John: In society, you have the people at the polarity at the bottom, and you have people at the unity at the top.

It’s a basic principle of society structure. It’s a social structure. So you have fewer in number, greater in consciousness and greater in number and lesser in consciousness. That’s how it is. Conscious is basically the degree of full awareness of both sides simultaneously. When you’re unconscious, you’re ignoring some part of it.

You have a subjective bias versus subjective truth. That was the whole journey of the subjective biases to the truth. And in survival, you have more subjective biases to capture prey and avoid predator. At the top, you don’t see prey or predator. You know that the prey by itself makes you gluttonous and fat and not fit.

And you know that the, the, the predator makes you amazed and starved and not fit. But you know that you need the prey and the predator in perfect balance in order to have maximum fitness. So you’re not avoiding or seeking either the prey or the predator. But the master is fewer in number, greater in consciousness.

Erick: Yeah, that’s an interesting thing because I know that a lot of people, you know, think you should, you know, they’re always like. You know, I’m the predator and, and, you know, they have that, that idea and they look down upon the prey rather than looking at the prey as somebody like, well, it’s just a balance.

John: Okay. But all it is, is the attack of the disowned part within themselves. We only attack the parts we don’t love in ourselves. We only want to fix or attack the parts we don’t love in ourselves. And once we learn to love that part and appreciate that part and own that part, there’s nothing to attack.

There’s nothing to be right or wrong about. Yeah. In fact, the ideas of right and wrong is, and the moral extremes are part of the signs of the amygdala. The amygdala lives in that world. The executive center is more moderate. It has more of a relative construction and they know their situational ethics and they know there’s a time for everything under the sun.

And so that’s the nature of the universal laws.

Erick: Yeah. It’s kind of like the bully beating up on the weak kid.

John: You need the bully. Without the bully, the little wuss doesn’t grow up.

Erick: Yeah. But the bully is so scared of weakness. That’s why he goes with some beats up on the weak kid rather than beating up on somebody his size to prove how tough he is.

John: That’s why they’re joined together in unity. That’s why they’re there.

Erick: Interesting. I never thought of that.

John: Yeah. The more you get supported, the more juvenilely dependent you become. The more you get challenged, the more precocious, the independent you become. Yeah. When you realize that maximum growth and development occurs at the border of support and challenge, you then efficiently grow on track.

Otherwise you grow too slow or too fast. Testosterone tends to accelerate the growth. Estrogen tends to slow down the growth. That’s called a neotenian pedophilia and, and recapitulation and Gould’s work. So if you end up having a perfect balance between support and challenge, that’s why if you can see when somebody challenged you, who’s the supporter, when somebody is supporting you, where’s the challenge?

If you can see both and take the time to look for both, it’s always there. You just overlooked it. And therefore you got emotional and the emotions are feedback to let you know you’re not seeing the whole picture at once. When you see the whole picture, you’re graced. And you feel love for life. You feel the four virtues.

Erick: Yeah. There was something that you said in one of your books that criticism from somebody is trust that you are capable of handling it. And I really liked that. I was just like, Oh yeah, if somebody is criticizing you about something, they’re actually supporting you because they’re, they believe you can handle this.

John: You’re, you’re an entrepreneur in the making. The more that, the more you go and study the entrepreneurs, they didn’t come from an over supportive environment. They came from one that was challenging. That’s why they became precociously independent.

Erick: Yeah.

John: The others are basically working for other people because they were protected and supported and they were looking for a daddy figure to take care of them or a mommy figure to take care of them.

Erick: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, those are all interesting ideas. So one of the things you mentioned earlier, um, I didn’t get to this part of the book, uh, you talk about your, the Demartini method. What do you mean by that? Can you kind of give us a breakdown of, of kind of your structure?

John: The Demartini method is a series of very concise questions that I’ve accumulated since age 18 on how to integrate, um, the two sides of our own nature.

To become conscious of what we’re unconscious of so we can see the hidden order in the apparent chaos. So we can become poised, not poisoned by our misperceptions and be more objective, not subjective. It’s a very scientific, reproducible, duplicatable system. I’ve taught 10, 000 facilitators around the world, how to use it.

And they’re using it in all different walks of life. to help people take events in their life that they saw one side of and had an emotional reaction to, terrific or terrible, you know, torturous or ecstatic and calm them down out of the bipolar state into a stable state and allows them to use it and see life on the way, not in the way.

So it’s something I’ve been developing and been teaching for many, many decades now. And, uh, I just keep working on it. As my research points out, it keeps expanding. It’s got now, uh, there’s about 80 questions in it now in total. That is very concise questions that’ll, that are, every one of them are insightful to people, mind blowing to people when they ask them, like, like I asked, when you see something you see in them, what specific trade action, inaction do you perceive in them that you despise or admire?

Where, and when do you do it? That’s one insightful question. When you. Reflect and realize pure reflective awareness liberates. And then you go and take the trait you think you admire, what’s the downside, the trait you despise, what’s the upside, and level the playing field until it is neither positive or negative.

And now all of a sudden you’ve transcended the moral trap that you were in or the hypocrisy you’re in, that you projected onto them and disowned in yourself. And now you own it. Then you go to the where you’ve done it and find the benefits of when you’ve done it. To take away the shame or the drawbacks to when you’ve done it, to take away the pride.

Cause pride and shame is not your authentic self. They’re minimizations or exaggerations of yourself. So then those are leveled. Then you go in there and then take and find out where that individual did exactly the opposite traits. You stop the label. They’re always this way. They’re never this way and take out the level of the always and nevers, which are absolutes, which is a finite thinking with the middle again, um, And realize that every human being’s got all the traits.

When you finally realize that you can love people, then you go and look for at the exact moment when this is occurring, who’s doing the opposite, which is mind blowing when you get to really master that skill. And then you realize that it’s just a pair of options always paired together, but you biased it and saw one without the other.

And now you’re fully awakened to see that they’re simultaneous as one wants it. And then you go under and you ask, okay. When they did something you resented, if they had done the opposite in that moment, the fantasy of what you thought they should have done, which is why you resented them, what would be the drawback?

Because as long as you’re addicted to a fantasy, you’ll never appreciate your reality because you keep comparing your reality to a fantasy that doesn’t exist. So those are just seven of the questions of 80 questions that are very precise. And then you’re actually, there’s one in there, as there’s somebody criticizing you about what you did in the past, who’s praising you about what you’re about to do in the future and make you aware of temporal entanglement, a quantum phenomenon inside brain function.

So there’s 80 questions. Each one of them are very in depth ways of helping you sort through the illusions of your conscious and unconscious splits that you store in the subconscious mind, the amygdala and hippocampus. And allow you to see things from an executive function where you’re able to govern yourself and be self actualized.

And so that’s the program, um, you know, the method is designed to help people self actualize their life. And it’s very stoic. Some of the same principles that have been standing the test of time since Zeno are sitting there, because he was the unity of opposites.

Erick: Yeah. Yeah. I found for me, the more I’ve been able to internalize a lot of the stoic ideas and again, working on this book, uh, for me was, I guess I could say I had to get into the technical aspects and really digging into that and having to internalize these, working on my podcast internalizing this, you know, writing episodes and really digging into it so that I could make sure that I was explaining things properly and explaining things in a way that was useful to people.

whole life and my perspective on it, uh, on my life. And I’ve found that I’m much more relaxed and peaceful overall and I have a lot less anxiety. I worry less about things. I still struggle because I’m, uh, just organized as I want to be and that You know, I, I get easily distracted by, Ooh, shiny thing. I’m going to go read this or watch this amazing interview and, you know, read your book and things like that, that they get distracting.

So I don’t get as much work done, but I think

John: you wouldn’t do those distractions if they weren’t somehow fulfilling some value you were still focusing on.

Erick: Yeah, for sure. So, uh, there’s a podcast I really enjoy watching and it’s called Diary of a CEO. And there was an episode he did with Jimmy Carr, the comedian from England.

And Jimmy is, he’s a brutal comedian. Like, his stuff is crass and crude and it’s just, it’s really, really funny. But him as a person is so genuine, kind, humble. He’s very philosophical. He understand, you know, he quoted some of the Stoics and other things like that. And I got so much from it. I kept, you know, I was doing some work around my apartment.

So I just moved in and I kept coming over to my notepad and writing things down and like, Oh, I got to look that up. Oh, that’s a great idea because it just kept, you know, so many light bulbs just kept going off and there were just so many connections made. So for me, there’s that. I think there’s always been that level of learning, which is why one time, so the Mormons believe that if you go to the highest level of, of God, the celestial kingdom, that you’ll be perfect.

You know, you’ve reached perfection and you’ll live forever with God. And I was thinking about it one time, I think I was maybe 10 or 11. And the idea occurred to me that if I was perfect and I knew everything, that would be hell because I would be so bored. And I would be living forever. And so for me, I find that, that as much as I struggle

John: It’s a dopamine shift.

Erick: What’s that?

John: It’s a dopamine shift.

Erick: Oh yeah, yeah.

John: You’re looking for the mask. You know, it’s, no matter what, as Socrates, Socrates said it really well. He said, you know, um, I know nothing. He understood that whatever you know is finite, whatever you don’t know is infinite. So relative to the infinite, you have an infinitesimal knowledge.

So he realized how little he knew, which allowed him to live with holy curiosity, as Einstein said. I’d much rather live with holy curiosity than to think I’m done. So when I see somebody who’s enlightened, I tell them time to reincarnate, dude. Start over. I’m joking with them. So I, I, I, I live with it. I, I, there’s no end to want to learn.

There’s no end to it. So you can’t possibly be done. You can’t. Oh yeah. The perfection, the many people think. The perfection is a one sided thing, which is unobtainable. The Buddha says the desire for that which is unobtainable, the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable is the source of human suffering.

So the striving for one sided perfection is futile. No one will ever get that. And that’s a great opium seller.

But the realization of the perfection of the two sides is something inescapable. And so awaking our awareness is actually waking up to the inescapable magnificence that we are. And that’s an ongoing growing process of our own magnificence.

Erick: Yeah, but you, you’re definitely right about the dopamine hits and, uh, and continuous growth. I remember there was a quote by, uh, this cellist, uh, I, I’m totally blanking on his name, but he, I think he died like at 89 or something like that. And he was still practicing up until he died and people were like, Oh, you’ve had this glorious career.

Why are you, you know, why are you still doing that? You know, you, you don’t need to do that anymore. And he was like, You know, he was still was practicing four and five hours a day, even though he was technically retired. And he said, well, through my practice, I think I’m still finally, I think I’m still beginning to learn something.

Yeah. And it was just like, yeah, he was the yo yo ma of his time. And yet he is at this age, he’s like, because I think I’m starting to learn something. Not, you know, Oh, I’m, I’m finding one little thing here. I’m finishing this. He’s like, I think I’m finally starting to learn something. And I was like, wow, that is an incredibly.

humble attitude of somebody who, again, is a master. He’s been doing it his whole life, still practicing because he’s still learning something about the cello. And, uh, I just,

John: there’s no end to learning.

Erick: Yeah.

John: I do it every day. Try to learn something every day, every day. Read, write, read, research, and write, and teach.

Erick: Yeah, me too. It’s something I can’t seem to get away from, and I’m glad. Um, and I think that’s interesting. I had a thought occur to me. I think that’s why, after I was laid off from my last job, a little over a year ago,

John: Perfection of it.

Erick: Well, I was doing software development and I’ve been doing that for 25 years now.

Um, but I didn’t have a real desire to go get another software job. I tried, you know, I’m like, Oh, I should go get another job. But the market was saturated with developers. They’d be like, go from Google and Facebook and other companies. And I, I applied to 70 positions. I got one interview and that was because the guy who referred me lived down the street from me, it was one of my neighbors.

And so they, I think out of, Politeness. They’re like, okay, we’ll interview this guy. But I haven’t done any coding in the last almost a year and a half and I haven’t missed it. But the thing that I do every day, not because I have to, but because I want to, is to study stoic philosophy, to learn and to grow and to think about these ideas and to write about these things and to create podcasts on these things, create programs about how to teach people these things.

You know, yeah, I’m just finding more and more. I love that. And working with my coaching clients and when I have some of those breakthroughs with them and I see the light bulbs go off on ideas that, that we come up with together, it just, yeah, it just lights me up. And so I think that. totally understand.

John: That’s exactly what’s the same thing for me for 52 years.

Erick: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, and I, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to like that or not because I’ve always been, I’ve always been working on something as far as creating something, whether that’s like writing a script or writing music or creating code or writing a book or something like that.

So it was like. Well, I mean, I guess this is creating stuff, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to like the coaching part of it, even though I love people and I’m an extrovert, but for me watching those light bulbs go off is just, it, it just thrills me and just in a deeply profound and humble way. That I’m able to share all of this hard won knowledge on my side and see them see the world in a different way.

Change their perspective into something that can be so much more helpful. Um, last Friday night I went to a meetup and ran into this, this guy who was originally from Syria and has been here for a number of years. And he said, I know a little bit about stoicism, but I haven’t found that thing yet that kind of hooks me in and pulls me into it.

So I was like, okay, well, ask me any questions you want. And so we started talking and we talked for about an hour and a half. And over and over he kept having those light bulb moments where he would just stop and say, Oh, Okay. Then he would rephrase it in a different way and bring it back and say, now, if I applied it to this, that’s how I can see that changing that perspective for me.

And it was just, it was sheer delight. And I was just like, I wish I’d had a video camera to record that because it was so fun watching his face, making those realizations.

John: Any time we get the opportunity. Anytime we get the opportunity to help other people awaken to their own magnificence and clarify what they feel their calling is, their mission, their, their, their metier, their highest value, whatever you want to call it.

It’s, it’s more than rewarding. It’s fulfilling. It’s our nature to want to make a difference in other people’s lives that helps us make a difference in ours.

Erick: Yeah, it’s that service element. Um, so we’ve been on for quite a while, so we should probably wrap up here. And one of the things I like to ask my guests is if there was one thing, one absolute truth, idea, um, what have you, creed that you could impart with my listeners that you think would make the biggest impact on their life?

What would that be? And I know that’s, that’s a, that’s a tall ask, but I think you might be up to the challenge.

John: Don’t compare yourself to others and put people on pedestals or pits, put them in your heart and compare your actions to your own highest values and measure yourself relative to your own dream, your own calling.

And no matter what you’ve done or not done, you’re worthy of love. Don’t be inculcating the injected values of outer authorities who may not even have thought through their own thinking, who have projected onto you ideals that aren’t real, that trap you in judging yourself instead of loving all parts of yourself.

Give yourself permission to shine, not shrink, to radiate, not gravitate, and to liberate, not embonded yourself to misperceptions.

Erick: That’s a lot to unpack, but I, I’ll leave that with my listeners and they can go back and rewind that and, and hopefully get something from that. But I really appreciate this conversation.

This has been very enlightening for me. I’ve had I’m sure you saw a few aha moments about things of, of perspective shifts on things that I hadn’t, I hadn’t looked at in a certain way. Um, and that’s been that for me when I have those conversations with people, I, I love that just as I love having watching and helping others get their light bulb moments when I have those, it, it feels wonderful.

It’s, it’s definite dopamine hits and I, I love that.

John: Well, I’m the same way. So we’re kindred spirits on a journey and getting to share what we both love to share on a daily basis. So. So thank you for the opportunity for being on your show and for asking these great questions and getting to explore what we got to explore.

And just thank you. You’re helping me fulfill my mission. So thank you.

Erick: I’m glad to, I’m glad to go on the journey with you. This is, it’s life is pretty amazing and I’m, and the older I get and the more I learn and the more I grow, the better my life gets and meeting people like you, meeting and sharing ideas like this are definitely a big part of that.

So thank you very much for your time.

John: Thank you. I appreciate this. The same thing. Thank you.

Erick: So thank you for joining us for today’s Stoic Coffee Break podcast. Again, this is Dr. John Martini. And if you want, uh, if you could tell people where they can find more about you, if you have a website, if you’re on social media, whatever it is.

John: My website. My, my website is simply DrDeMartini drdemartini.com. D-E-R-D-E-M-A-R-T-I-N i.com, drdemartini.com. If they just type in my name, Dr. John Demartini, it’ll come up and, um, excellent. And if they’ve got anything out of our presentation and they want to go to that value determination process, it’s free.

It’s complimentary. Go and take it, go through the little exercise. It’s, it is the eye opening ideas you’ll get to, cause the magnificence of who you are is far greater than any fantasies you’ll impose on yourself. And discovering what that is, is, is more than enlightening. It’s life changing. It’s trajectory changing.

Erick: Excellent. I will, I will make sure that I could do that myself. I was very interested in those 80 questions and seeing what, uh, seeing what results from that. So thank you very much. Hey friends. So that’s the end of this week’s Stoic Coffee Break. I hope that you enjoyed this interesting and wide ranging conversation with Dr.

John Demartini. Uh, I hope that his insights were helpful for you as you go on your spiritual and philosophical journey. And as always, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and thanks for listening. Also, if you’re not following me on social media, I would appreciate if you would do so. You can find me on Instagram and threads at stoic.coffee and Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook at StoicCoffee. Thanks again for listening.

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