The Myth Of Selfless Service

0:00Welcome, everyone. Thank you for listening to the mindfulness exercises podcast. Today, I'm honored to welcome Dr. John Demartini to the podcast. Dr. Demartini is a world-renowned human behavior expert, educator, researcher, best-selling author, speaker, who's work has helped people around the world better understand the relationship between perception, purpose, values, and personal transformation. He's the creator of the Demartini method, a practical approach for helping people dissolve limiting perceptions, clarify what matters most, and move towards greater resilience and meaning and inspired action. Over the past five decades, Dr. Demartini has studied across many disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, human performance, leadership, and well-being. Dr. Demartini, thank you so much for being here.

1:04It's an honor to have you here and I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Thanks for inviting me and have me on your podcast. A lot of us have these sheds in our lives. Like, I should be helping others. I should do what my parents want me to do. The list goes on and I wonder if in your experience as people go through their questions is service always part of people's paths? I think some of our audience, we have a lot of mindfulness teachers as a part of our community. They feel like they should be sharing mindfulness with others and there's often a fear of feeling selfish if service is not inherently a part of our path. Can you talk about whether service is always inherently part of our path? Well, I've been helping people discern what they believe is their mission or purpose in life

2:07for more than 50 years actually. We have a century for techs, a motor cortex, and so sensory input, affection, and motor output, affection is part of that. We're not here to be sacrificing altruistically our life for service to others at the expense of self, which is a minimization of self and exaggeration of others. Eventually, that's non-sustainable futility. You've actually get frustrated and say, damn, I deserve more than that. And it's not also wise to not statistically expect rewards without a service. That's again, non-sustainable futility. And that means you get you humbled because if you're not creating a sustainable fair exchange with people and you're right-gently projecting onto what you think is important, but it's not meeting your needs, they withdraw until you get humbled and bring it back into equilibrium. If you're sacrificing yourself for somebody else and minimizing yourself, you eventually start to withdraw because you're not getting rewarded for it. So you eventually say, damn, I deserve better than that. You come back up and bring it back into equilibrium. Nature and society gives

3:09a feedback to try to get us back into sustainable fair exchange where we're not judging somebody above and below us and we're not fighting ourselves for shaming ourselves, which is being ourselves, where we have sustainable fair exchange, equanimity and equity between ourselves and other people. So nature forces that. So that means that in every purpose in life that's going to be fulfilling, it's going to be fulfilling to the degree that it has a balance of success. Well, service and reward. You want to have a balance. It's sustainable fair exchange because then you can't wait to get up in the morning and be of service and people can't wait to get your service. And that creates a sustainable objective. I've been teaching that as Stacey Adams has told it equity theory. I've been teaching that for decades and corporations. When people find that balance, this supply-demand system maximizes efficiency, but if they try to go to one side of the other, it eventually creates symptoms. I really believe that the symptoms in our life, in our relationship life, our social life, our physiology, our autonomic feedback, and our business life is constantly trying to get us into equanimity where we're authentic. And that's where we're really mindful. We're mindful of both

4:13sides of ourselves. We're not the hero or the villain or the hero villain. I learned one time ago, miss most people are trying to get rid of half themselves and only get one sided. But in Buddhism, the Buddha said the desire for that, which is unobtainable and the desire to avoid that, which is unavoidable is the source of human suffering. So that's like trying to get a one-sided magnet or trying to get something for nothing or give something for nothing. It's non-sustainable. So the purpose, a mission for people will require a fulfillment of both sensory and motor, receiving and giving. That requires reward and service. And when those are in perfect balance, then people want to continue to do business with this. They want to keep being in relationship. Every relationship, even in the intimate relationship, is striving for sustainable fair exchange. If they don't feel that they're getting as much out of it, they withdraw, or they start retaliating to try to get it by an equilibrium. So I think that the service is half of the equation, but reward is also half. Why not do it? You love it and get hands on me paid for. Why not provide a service that you truly value that other people value and have a sustainable

5:15fair exchange? So you have a perpetuation of growth. Why not? I asked myself many years ago, seven questions, and they've been with me for a long time. What is it I would absolutely love to do in life? Well, I wanted to travel the world and teach. So I'm traveling the world teaching today. And I asked, how do I get hands on me and beautifully paid to do that? I didn't want to say, how can I afford to do that? Because that's basically a costing to do what you love. How do I get hands on me and beautifully paid to do that? Then I asked, what are the highest priority actions I can do today to move me one step closer to that reality? Then next question is, what obstacles might I run into? How do I solve them in advance? I mitigate the obstacles. So I increase the probabilities of going after what I really love. Why have a quiet life of desperation? You can have a life of inspiration. It's totally up to us. And then I asked, what worked and what didn't work today? When I, as I go down that path? And how do I do it more effectively and officially tomorrow? And then no matter what happened today, how did you get me one step closer to my objective? Whether I was supported or challenged doesn't matter. How did whatever happen today? Get me one

6:17step closer to the subjective. If you master those seven questions and did those every day, there's no way you're not going to get your movement towards the outcome. It may take weeks or months or years. Who cares? You're still moving. It's the journey, not just the destination. Anyway, suppose you do get to the destination like you have, do you then redo it to come up with something new or do you just enjoy where you are? Well, I've been teaching for November of the 54 years. That's my thing. I love it. I can't wait to get up in the morning and do it. I think that the population growth is still exceeding my ability to reach everybody. So I keep to be busy. If I see a country that needs humanitarian service to try to procreate because the population declining, I figure that maybe I can offer service there too. I'm joking, that's the bad joke. But the point is that I can't wait to get up and learn something. No matter what you know, what you know is an infinitesimal compared to what you don't know. And so what you don't know is an infinite to penetrate new mysteries and to keep growing with holy curiosity, keep expanding

7:18awareness and potential. I think is the fulfillment of life. Meisel do that every day of our life. So I don't have an end to what I'm going to do. I have no possible way. I'm going to know there's been a small speck of the universe. So I'm Meisel do that. Einstein inspired me when I was young. He said, it's enough for me on a daily basis to contemplate and try to penetrate another mystery and uncover the intelligent in the universe, the intelligent that permeates the universes they said. He believed that there was some sort of rational order as the logos of Heraclitus described. There's an inherent rational order in the universe. Let's go and research it. Science wouldn't exist if they didn't believe that there was some sort of rational order. They wouldn't create the scientific system to try to uncover it. So I'm a firm believer as a scientist to find a hidden order in the apparent chaos and penetrate the mysteries. Information theory says a disorder is missing information and water is reclaiming it. So let's go and use our brain, use our mind to continue to expand. I hope to do that every day in my life. You mentioned the phrase holy curiosity. Is that what you mean when you talk about

8:22you know, Einstein's interest in discovering, say the fabric of the universe or the order of the way things are and discovering what this world is and that there's like a sacredness to it or holiness of the universe itself? Or are you speaking towards sort of an attitude of curiosity of sincerity and humility to all the above? I think you've said it perfectly. In information theory, as I said, the universe has a tendency to go to disorder. Material universe tends to go to disorder, but there's a self-organizing system that's going towards order at the same time, life. Urban Schrodinger in 1944 wrote a book, What is Life and he described it as negative entropy. And so I believe that if we are unconscious of things and we're in the dark and we're not awake as sleep, you might say, an ignorant of information, we're undergoing entropy. We usually then have a biased, subjected biased interpretation of reality and we have kind of an emotional bias and we're

9:22polarized with our opinions and we're opinionated in depth with in group out group bias on information and our perceptions of people in our environment. But if we learn to ask questions that help us balance that like Hagel did with a dialectic and Xeno did to try to find the synthesis of opposites, the unity of opposites, it helps us account or be more accountable and not bias in our interpretation and we get closer to a whole instead of just a part. That's why in the research I've done, you find people propose something and then you find somebody propose the opposite and challenge it and it goes back and forth like a dialectic, but there's some synthesis that's there that's worthy of both sides. And my way of trying to screen out the illusions is to study, I'm a polymath so I basically studied 300 different disciplines, about 31,000 books. I basically go through there and study various disciplines to try to find common threads in the principles that underlie them because the more the disciplines have the same principle, the higher the probability that that might be meaningful. And I try to build a body of knowledge on that which is cross-disciplinary.

10:26So that doesn't guarantee that I've got anything that's true, it just increases the probability that I've got something I can build a foundation on. That's all. Multi-disciplinary approach. Random question, gonna tie to that, you've been referencing, say, physics and negative entropy. I'm wondering if you happen to have a theory around the synthesis of like macro physics and micro physics, the large and the ultra tiny, or how our minds or our mental energy may relate to either both of those. I love the question. Thank you. Well, that's tying together general relativity and quantum, right? That's the big paradox that they've been trying to solve. Quantum loop gravity is an attempt to try to do that, trying to take a general theory and distortion of the fabric as space-time and put it into some quantum bits of information. This is an approximation of it, whether it's to be true and gravitational interpies and other one. These are very approximations to that objective. Some believe that there's kind of a pan-psychic field of consciousness that

11:31is mediating between these two. And when we're at a level of mystery in basically uncertainty and probability, we're looking at quantum events, and when we have something that's more clarity, we can look at more classical events. And that's the boundary of our computational awareness that's differentiating those two. There's all kinds of theories. I've been devouring those theories for decades. I can't say that I've come to an absolute conclusion, but I do believe that there's some really practical tools in the quantum principles that and apply to conscious behavior. That's been my area. That's where I started. I read the principles quantum mechanics by Paul DeRack when I was 18, and that really inspired me. And I also read Leibnitz's work on the discourse on metaphysics. And that put me on a journey to try to find the hidden order in the apparent chaos. And so I took that to particle physics, and I took that out to thermodynamics, and I took that over to philosophy and the idea of continuity and discontinuity. I went every direction with that. And I believe that there are some universal principles that we can create a framework to be able

12:35to explain not necessary consciousness, but the dynamic applications of consciousness in the world, which is practical. And so I think that there is a way of unifying that. We're trying to put it into a mathematical proof has been puzzling, but I believe that there's a way of doing it. And I really believe that believe or not, weerhead said love is part of that. Freeman Dyson at the Institute Advanced Studies, I had a conversation with him at Princeton, and we were discussing that, and weerh who is across the hall from him, he believed that that was the foundation of it all. Not love in the sense of romanticism, not courage is idea, but love in the sense of the synthesis and synchronistic of all compromises that are entangled, that are not really separate except in our mind, and we measure things with some sort of bias. I think that we have the capacity to uncover this unifying field of love that's there, and that sounds kind of romantic, but it's not. It really is what Heraclitus was described in the logos back in the ancient times, a unification of opposites. I think that that is where the actual unification of opposites at

13:40Planck's length is the junction between the classical and the quantum, and that's bits of information that are unified in sort of a pisonic state. So I think we have access to that. As close as we got in the language we have today, we may have new language and decades to come and we'll get even more approximate, but that's a very close approximation to it today. It has project glaplication in human psychology, philosophy, theology, and in science, and in neuroscience, and in also AI science. Some people talk about mindfulness as loving awareness. Sure. That works. And it sounds like a lot of love. Maybe this is a little bit more in the romantic sense, but perhaps in more senses there's an attitude or an awareness of things as they are. There's a say a sense of acceptance and fluidity of moving with the moment, meeting it as it unfolds. There's some adaptability to the changing world. When somebody perceives somebody with more

14:45posities and negatives, they activate Yamigla, which assigns a valency, a positive valency to it. It's stored in the hippocampus as an episodic memory. It then creates an impulse to seek. It activates dopamine and nucleus accumins and gets the pleasure compounds out. And we go seeking it and we're actually blind to the downsides and that seeking creates intrusive thoughts that occupy space and time to mind. And we now have a fantasy about it and we try to sleep at night within Somnia. We can't sleep because we're fantasizing about this thing that's about to happen. And this is not love. This is an infatuation. It's not a romantic love, as Kudrid says, and romanticism. It's a lopsided perception that's giving us the symptomatology to let us know that we're incomplete in our awareness and we're not listening to our intuition to what are the downsides and we're becoming impulsive and gullible. On the other side, if we're now resentful to somebody and we're conscious of the downsides and unconsciously upsides, now we've got an instinct to avoid this. We activate the sympathetic nervous system. It now occupies space and time to

15:46mind. Now we have intrusive thoughts. Now we have a nightmare and we can't sleep at night. So the insomniotic state that keeps us from sleeping is basically let us know we're fearing the loss of something we're seeking and fearing the gain of something we're trying to avoid and it's creating an autonomic dysregulation. And this is not love. This is the distortion. This is the mindlessness. It's also missing information because it's unconscious. So it's a lot of entropy and a lot of aging and a lot of symptomatology. But if we're able to see both sides simultaneously, when you get to know somebody and love somebody for 60 years of marriage, you know the things you like, the things you dislike and you see them simultaneously and you're just present with them and you embrace them as a whole. That kind of love, which is not seeking or avoiding, it's just present with. To me, that's mindfulness. Mindfulness is when you're full and you're not missing with unconscious information. You're fully conscious of both sides simultaneously and you feel the love for that individual over the universe or for the goal or for anything. And now you have a clear consciousness. It's not having intrusive thoughts. You're present. I started doing meditation

16:51in 72 and I taught meditation and yoga and all kinds of stuff for years. I've noticed all the noise and the brain that we start out our meditation with is nothing but preoccupations with the things that were polarized and are available in our amygdala, they're occupying space and time to undermine to let us know what we haven't loved and getting us an opportunity to love it. And as we meditate, we eventually transcend that, not attached to those distractions and start to see it and able to see both sides and then we become mindful. And I think that that is love. Love is the synthesis and synchronistic of comp and re-opposites that the mind is striving intuitively with feedback systems to obtain. It's doing what he can to master that in our life. I think that everything's going on in our life is a feedback to guide us to that. It's trying to do that. Our physiology, our sociology, our psychology, our relationships, our businesses are trying to get us back to that state of awareness. You talked about how our minds often veer towards fear or seeking.

17:52And I think that's a helpful question for a lot of people when they sit down to meditate or when they're just going about their day. Is there fear here? Is there seeking here? Not to judge it but just to be aware of it and sense into it and then to meet it, maybe embrace it and practice our meditation or our mindfulness and maybe go through some questions about how to proceed. I'm curious about your meditation practice these days if you incline towards say loving awareness of what's here or are you sensing into next steps of your path, curious what your meditation looks like these days. I had the blessing to explore various tools and methodologies of meditation. I can't say I'm attached any of them. I use them all. I've done breathing meditations and mantra meditation, sound meditations. They've all been there. They all have a place and they all have

18:52views and they're all served. But ultimately anything that integrates the mind, some people do meditation to escape and they dissociate and I find that as like an early stage of meditation experience, but real meditation is not seeking or avoiding. It's finding the pairs of opposites that they're your poised and present instead of trying to seek or avoid. So when somebody says well that person's stressful and I don't want to be around that, I need to go meditate and escape that and get over that. I would go into meditation in that case and I would say what am I perceiving and I would ask what specific trait or action or inaction do I perceive this individual displaying or demonstrating that I disliked or despised or reacted to or a one avoid most and really define what it is that I have a button on that I'm judging and that I'm from past experience stored in my subconscious mind which is my hippocampus. A wound of because they're becoming into my life to help me see that and then I go in there and I go where go to a moment John where and when I perceive myself displaying or demonstrating that and I do reflective awareness and I ask where do I

19:56do the same thing and I assure you I've been doing that for a long time. Yeah, me too. I haven't seen anything on the outside that I'm not doing on the inside. So when I go in there and I look at that just me realizing that and realizing that I'm judging myself and I'm drawing this individual into my life to help me see that is part of the meditation process and then when I do it calms down my judgment because who am I to point my finger and then I do one step further and I go at the very moment they did the behavior that I judged how did it serve me because if I saw only the negatives in it I didn't look for the upsides and if I go in to hold myself accountable to equilibrate the upsides and bring myself into equanimity once I have an equanimity between myself and them and equanimity of the positive negative valency on it there's nothing there except thank you and your heart opens and then you realize if they're you and they're they brought into your life to help you love a part of you that you've been disowning and so then there's nothing there then all the noise in the brain that you're needing to meditation to escape is gone and now you're just

20:57present and realizing there was a hidden order in their presence and you're thankful and there's nothing to be phobic about you only have two types of fear the fear of loss or something you're seeking or the fear of getting or something you're avoiding if you're not highly polarized and there's no seeking avoid the philias and phobias dissolve and you're present I have a methodical cognitive system that I can do in the meditation to neutralize that in minutes so then the noise that normally takes a while to get into that meditative state calms down as quick as I'm able to do that I'm present and then I feel love for the person and myself there's nothing there to judge in the first place I bought into some sort of moral hypocrisy about me being a half person you don't need to get rid of half of yourself to love yourself you got to be able to embrace the hero in the building 42 years ago I went to the Oxford English dictionary and I went through every page of that dictionary that's the biggest diction I was able to find and I underlined every word that was the human behavioral trait and out to the little tiny edge of the page I wrote the initials

21:58of the people who I thought was the most extreme example of that behavior I went okay in concern language or something or verbal criticism and then I would go out who I know that was the most verbal critical in my life and I'd put their initial and then I'd go in there and ask where and when do I display and demonstrate that until it was equal in quantity and quality to the individual that I saw the most extreme on and as I was doing this I went through 4,628 traits over a couple years when I got through I realized it's all me there was nothing missing at the level of the most essential self some people in theology called it the soul nothing's missing in you that's what pleuromic fulfillment was about to the nostics that's what equanimity is about that's what the middle path the fulfillment and the lotus position if you want to call that was mindfulness because the mind is nothing missing and in that state I went through all the pros and cons the positive negatives I found ahead of all I was nice and mean and kind and cruel and positive and negative and peaceful and wrathful and considered and considered and generous and stingy every single

22:59trait at different moments in my life to the degree that I was projecting and that was amazing experience to realize I don't need to get rid of anything all of it was serving if I thought there was a negative to it I found the upside if I thought it was a project I found the downside and I leveled the playing field until I realized I'm a human being with all of it instead of trying to get rid of half of me to be supposedly me which is a facade I was able to be able to be with the whole that's mindfulness when you can love all parts of yourself that's mindfulness there's no disowned parts that cause that occupy space in time your mind that you're seeking and avoiding anymore yeah and the full integration it's the integration that's what the medial pre-phonal cortex is attempting to do in our brain that's why they call it the sea of the self in scientific american in 2022 and I think that that's what all the homeostatic mechanisms in the brain biochemically as well as neurochemically that's what is trying to accomplish is trying to help us be the most magnificent fulfilled individual we can possibly be but we are indoctrinated by all kinds of moral hypocrisies about how we're to be that's interfering with us being mindful we're

24:03trying to get rid of parts of ourselves and trying to be only one sided and that's why the Buddha said the search for that which is unobtainable and the avoidance of that which is unavoidable is a source of human suffering there's nothing to avoid nothing to seek it's all present nothing's missing the Bompolama in Nepal I spent time with the Bompolama went to his little temple there in Nepal and Kathmandu area and we had a conversation about the state they had a big smile on his face he says nothing missing we all become aware that nothing missing fulfillment he said it really well well it was a pretty good impression I felt that