Positive Thinking Never Sticks w/ Dr. John Demartini | Ep 455

0:00Negativity is an absolutely essential aspect of human behavior. It is pointless to try to get rid of it. It's needed. Learning what it's trying to reveal to our minds is important. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Future. I'm Rich Cardona, the show's producer, and this is part two of Chris's conversation with Dr. John Demartini, who he absolutely loves. If you missed part one, we watched the Demartini Method live. A woman started in deep resentment towards someone who blew up her marriage and ended, somehow, in gratitude. And if you missed it, it's one episode back and definitely worth your time for context.

0:40In this half, Dr. Demartini takes on the bigger question. Why do our minds go negative in the first place? And why does forcing positivity never stick? His answer involves 300 self-help books, 2 ,000 index cards, and a two-year experiment in pure positive thinking that came out by his own math to exactly zero. Here's part two. What is it about our human nature that we tend to focus on the negative and not the positive? Because if you keep doing this, it seems like we're all exactly where we need to be, and we learn the moment we appreciate all that's happened. When I turned 18 years old, I was living in Hawaii as a big wave rider surfer.

1:20And I left there and I came to Texas to visit my parents. So I left home at a young age, 13. My parents saw that I wanted to go and learn how to read and go back and try to learn again. So I was inspired by Paul Bragg, who helped me believe that maybe someday I could be intelligent. Because I was told I would never be able to read, write, communicate, and have a amount of things that would go very far in life when I was first grade. I didn't read until I was 18. So I got inspired and I started back and my parents bought a set of books, a little triplet book by Norman Minson Peel, The Power of Positive Thinking.

1:56So I read this book and I thought I need to be more positive. And I was reading it with a dictionary because my vocabulary was limited. But I tried and tried and tried and tried to be positive, positive, positive, positive. But no matter what I did, I'd falter. I'd have some judgment on myself or on somebody else or whatever. And I thought, what am I doing wrong? And so I got a whole collection of self-help books thinking I was going to eventually get there to a positive pull of a magnet without the other pull. And no matter what I did, I kept faltering. I'd have negative thoughts. So I said, well, maybe I need to go live to the seminar.

2:30So it's starting at age 20. I started attending seminars. I went to a live seminar with Norman Vincent Peale. He stood on stage and he says, you probably know me as the father of positive thinking, but I must confess before you today that I am one of the most negative thinking people you've ever met. And the reason I wrote the books on positive thinking is to help balance out my negativity. And I was the only one applauding. Everybody else was like shocked. And I was applauding. And then I went to the national speakers and I met Earl Nightingale and his brother. And I met W. Clement Stone. And I met Tremendous Jones and Jim Rohn and all these speakers.

3:04Right. And I got to interact with them and hang out with them and find out about their lives and stuff. And as I was emerging from 18-year-olds, I wanted to be a teacher. And so I started my teaching career. I got to meet those people and every one of them had both positive and negative. And so I thought, why are we teaching something nobody's living? And I remember Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize winner, he wrote a book in 1947 called The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. And he said, it's not that we don't know so much, it's we know so much that we can sell. were taught misinformation. Political and theological systems like to be in the guilt-producing control business.

3:41They love to create a moral hypocrisy that nobody can live by so you can feel ashamed so they can control you with the fantasy of the afterlife and the eternal damnation, eternal salvation, you might say, or the control of some projected moralities of society. So I started realizing, you know what? And it took me a decade to finally realize that no matter how hard I'm trying to do, I'm not getting positive without negative. They're coming together as a pair. And I'm supportive and challenging and nice and mean and kind and cruel. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, talked about the unity of opposites.

4:17And Paul Dirac got his information from particle and antiparticle physics from that idea. And I thought, the unity of opposites makes more sense to me because I'm having the unity of opposites. I'm having both. and the dialectic and the propositions of arguments and law. And then through the history from the time of Zeno, through Aristotle to Hegel and all these philosophers, they all were talking about the unity of opposites, bringing and synthesizing these pairs of opposites. And I thought, I wonder what would happen if we did that in our mind. We took the positive and negatives and integrated them in our mind.

4:48Could we liberate ourselves from the intrusive thoughts and the things that occupy space and time in our mind that run our lives? Because anybody that's highly infatuated can't sleep at night. They got insomnia because they're on the alert. I got food in front of me. I don't want to lose it. So I'm awake. Or if I got somebody I'm resentful, it's a predator. I got to stay awake because I could get eaten. And so we have this insomnia, which is symptomatic, trying to let us know we have imbalanced ratios of perception about people that were storing in our mind, causing these difficulties sleeping.

5:19So I set out to answer the question, is there such a thing as positive thinking by itself? So at age 28, I took 300 bestselling books on positive thinking. I underlined every positive word in those things and compiled those into a 2 ,000 index cards list. And I wrote a book. You can find it online, 2 ,000 Quotes to the Wise, a day-by-day guide to inspirational living by Dr. Demartini. I published it in 1983 on the most positive words and the most positive meditated affirmations and quotations that could be stated by that. And I put this book together and then I decided I was going to quote those, divide that into 365 days.

5:58I put five to six quotes per day. I decided I was going to chant them 108 times like the rosary beads or the Joppa beads by the International Society of Krishna Consciousness. and I'm going to go through and inculcate my brain with the most positive words, the most positive statements, most positive things I could, and then monitor and measure on a day-by-day cycle forecasting form the seven areas of my life to see what impact it's having on my life. And I did that for two years, every single day, four monitorings a day, seven, 11, three, and seven, and monitored what impacted saying nothing but positive words and nothing but positive statements impact my life.

6:35And I monitored it. and at the end of two years, I got a Texas instrument calculator out, if you all remember those, and I calculated all the fluctuations of all the highs and lows and positive negatives I had during the time I was concentrating most intensely, more than anybody I'd ever met, on positive thinking, and it came out zero, and then I learned something that I could have learned if I'd have just studied. I learned that there's a thing called hedonic adaptation, that each of us have a set point that automatically oscillates our positives and negatives and brings us back. We also have a moral licensing effect.

7:11Anytime we get proud, we give ourselves permission to do something to undermine it, to make sure we feel shame, to get us back in equilibrium. When we do something with shame, we do something to go pride. We go and work out. We then give ourselves permission to drink wine and eat and do things as a homeostat to try to keep us to the set point of our authentic state. So I realized at the end of it that it was a pointless thing to try to be one-sided. The Buddha said the desire for that which is unobtainable and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable is a source of human suffering. So instead of trying to get one half of a magnet and try to get rid of the other half of a magnet, which is futile, I finally embraced the positive and negatives.

7:47And I started asking, why do we have negativity? And I found without the uncertainty about it, that the second you have negativity, it's because it's there to break your addiction to its opposite pole. So anytime your amygdala wants to avoid a predator and seek a prey, it wants to create a positive without a negative, a pleasure without a pain, a happy without a sad, a peace without a war, it's trying to get a one-sided world that doesn't exist. And the moment you do, our negativity through our intuition comes out to try to break that addiction. Because if we get addicted to that, we become juvenilily dependent on it and we don't grow.

8:22So we have to have the other side in order to grow again. So nature brings us back to the unity of opposites, which is our authentic self. I'm both hero and villain, nice and mean, kind and cruel. I'm not a one-sided individual. None of us are. There is no such thing as a one-sided individual. There's no heroes out there. Any religion that promotes it or any politics that promotes it is a farce. Because when you really get to know somebody after you marry somebody, they got both sides. Giving yourself permission to be whole, which is exactly what all this was giving you transcends the illusion of trying to get a positive out of a negative.

8:56And trying to get rid of half of yourself is futile. You'll never love yourself if you're trying to get rid of all your negativity. It's pointless because you need it. You need it to break your addictions to the fantasies. Your executive center in the forebrain, which has foresight and strategic planning and is more the integrated center of the soul, according to Scientific American, September 2022, shows that our real self is that integrated self, not the fractured parts. So as long as we're striving for a one-sided world, the other side has to smack us. So negativity is an absolutely essential aspect of human behavior.

9:33It is pointless to try to get rid of it. It's needed. Learning what it's trying to reveal to our minds is important. And I found 15 most common reasons why we have negativity. We have unrealistic expectations on others to be one-sided, not both-sided. We have unrealistic expectations that others are going to live in our values, not their own. The combination of those two, we have an unrealistic expectation that we are going to be one-sided. So we have negative towards ourself. Why am I not positive? I had a negative. I feel proud when I do this. I feel shame this way. We become bipolar. Unrealistic expectation of us to live in other people's values like your husband or a combination of those two.

10:15Unrealistic expectation on the collective society to be living one-sided, final peace. Global Peace Index across the world shows a balance of peace and war across the world year after year after year, but idiots think they're going to get a one-sided world. You need both to grow, to transform, just like you need the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system for catalyst, for catabolism and anabolism to destroy and build in your body for you to adapt to changing environments. The world needs that. And the unrealistic expectation on the collective society that everybody's going to live in your values.

10:47When I spoke at UNESCO, United Nations, I trained 75 delegates there and cracked their fantasy that everybody, the world would be at peace if everybody would just follow their values, delusions. But we live in a delusion because our amygdala runs most people's lives, primarily because we've been taught we're supposed to get rid of half of ourselves and be one-sided. and we can't love ourselves or other people as long as we're striving for that which is unobtainable. So there's a series of reasons why we have negativity and the negativity is not our enemy, it's our friend because it's letting us know when we have unrealistic expectations.

11:20And our depression is a culmination of all those unrealistic expectations that do affect our biochemistry, but our pharmaceutical companies want you to believe it's because there's a lack of their drug, which is not true, robs people of their power. Nobody that has depression can't transcend it, guaranteed. I could just get warmed up. What's up, Milka? Based on what I heard from you as a designer, where everything that you're saying, I'm trying to put it together as an image, is that there's this cup, which is half full and half empty. And based on whatever other things that you heard, that's what I'm envisioning, that it's up to us how we see life, either half full or half empty.

12:07It could be like maybe one ounce water and the rest empty, but that one ounce water is still a blessing. It's not seeing one or the other. It's seeing both simultaneously. Wilhelm Wann, the father of experimental psychology, 1897 text, said that when people see simultaneous contrast, they have stability and authenticity. When they see sequential contrast and there's an arrow of time and entropy and disorder in the perception, you have inauthenticity. You have the imposter syndrome or the persona and mask parts that we wear. So if we are infatuated with somebody and we're unconscious of the downside, and then later we resent them and we're unconscious of the upside, which most marriages do, there's a sequential contrast.

12:52There's a separation between the positive and negatives. Anytime there's a separation, positive, negative, we're unstable. We have disorder, missing information. If we can see both of them simultaneously, that's why when you go out on the first date, you might as well get it out of the way, get it on the table. Find out what that is. Imagine me on a first date, right? It'd be torture.

13:17Yes. But my girlfriend does the same work. So she's right there. She just holds me accountable. I was in the Ritz Hotel in 1991 with my wife at the time, who's passed away. And we were listening to the prince and princesses of Japan on their honeymoon. They just got married. They're now the empress. An empress. But they were at the Ritz having dinner adjacent to us. And they had a 500-page document, both of them. And they were asking each other questions to get to know each other that were handed down for generations in Japan that were wise questions. really wise questions to help get to know the individual and break through the facades that they are when they're first together.

14:07I really believe that would be a useful tool for most people because the amygdala, when it sees prey, it creates a positive feedback system and a false positive in order to create adrenaline to be able to run fast enough to capture the prey. And so what we do is we generalize and distort and exaggerate the positives and have false negatives and subconscious disconfirming biases on the negatives at first to feed our fantasy instead of actually ground ourselves with quality questions. Better to get those questions out and save yourself enormous amounts of fantasy and unrealistic expectations. That's why the quality of our life is based on the quality questions, actually, if we ask quality questions.

14:51So this couple, the Prince and Princess, were doing something in balancing out the romance with a reason and making sure they got to know each other. If this happened, how would you respond? If this happened, how would you respond? If I did this, how would you respond? And it was offloaded for traditional questioning, so it wasn't an attack on them. is just thought-provoking questions to make you aware of you as a human being transcending the delusive fantasies that society tends to impose on marriages, which are costly in society. So it's a wise thing to do. That's why the quality of our lives is based on quality questions.

15:35I'm a lover of questions because a question makes you conscious of what you're unconscious of. My questioning made you conscious of what you're unconscious of. and you probably feel lighter now. Anytime you have emotions and valency and charge, and you're stored in the subconscious mind, which is the neural correlate, which is the amygdala and hippocampus, you create what is called entropic gravity. Eric Verlin's work, if you want to look it up, you create entropic gravity and you weigh yourself down. It ages you. Aging is a result of entropy and the arrow of time separating memory and imagination in the sequential contrast of awareness.

16:15So the second we bring those into synchronicity, we empower our life again. When a bank gives you a credit card and you go shopping and you get pleasure and 30 days later you get pain, they help you become addicted to consumerism because you assume you can get a pleasure without a pain. When I grew up, we had a layaway plan. You deferred gratification and you paid things. And then when you paid it off, you finally got it. That is much healthier and much more stable for a society to have deferred gratification because immediate gratification costs. Long-term vision and deferred gratification pays, investment-wise, relationship-wise, and every area of life, health-wise.

16:59So separating the inseparables, dividing the indivisibles, labeling unlabelables, naming the indefinables and polarizing the unpolarizables, go against what Empedocles and Heraclitus said 2 ,600 years ago and undermine human potential. So I try to bring them back by the questions we ask. I'm sure you're familiar with this piece of literature, but everything you're saying right now is reminding me of one of my favorite quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke about learn to live the questions and maybe someday in the distant future, you will be able to live your way into the answer or something like that. I'm butchering it, But everything you're saying, it's really interesting.

17:34We want answers so desperately. I feel like as humans, we want the pain, the suffering to be done, to be gone. And so every time you're talking about the quality of the questions, I just keep thinking about what he says in that, the letters to a young poet is the book. And he says, do not try to get the answer. He basically says, if the answers were given to you, you wouldn't even be able to live them. So learn to love the questions. And I feel like that's what you so beautifully display in your career and what you did today. And I think I may have to go to the seminar this weekend. We'd love to have you.

18:11It's my mission. I've done it 1 ,246 times. This will be 1 ,247 time I presented it. You keep such a distinct record of all the books you read. Who's doing this? I do it. I do it every day. I document everything. This show will be in my gratitude journal. I have 9 ,378 pages of journals. Tracking this on like a computer and journal? Just a good old Word document. Oh, amazing. By the way, there's a 12-step program, Survivors of Demartini. You can join me. Just less of a question, more of an observation. I had a few years ago going through a job loss and someone told me that, Chris, this is a gift and this bad negative thing that was happening to me.

18:58And then I just relends my whole life at that point in time, going back. And then, of course, going forward after that, everything that appears to be negative or bad, it really, truly is a gift. You see that as like a gift for us, just giving you something new, giving you're going to grow from it. Something is going to happen. Walk through that door. And if it didn't happen, you would be stuck. So thank you. You just summarized and said in 10 words what I just took 300 ,000 words to say. Your wisdom outshone me on that one. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you. By the way, the word passion that so fervently is promoted today, if you look at its etymology, it comes from passio and pati, which means to suffer.

19:46Compassion means to suffer with somebody. I have no interest in passion or compassion or the affections that Aristotle warned against. I'm simply interested in helping people discover their mission. Missing the ions. The charges are not there. Missing the ions. Not passing between the ions. The dharmic path, not the karmic path. The equanimity of the Christian construct or the myth construct of the path of the sun. You could give any religious construct or philosophical or perennial wisdom. You can see a way of saying the same thing. The unity of opposites. I remember in, I think it was 1985, I saw an illustration in Time Magazine when they used to do the little stories at the bottom.

20:31And it said that these scientists had actually discovered weightlessness. And they did a little diagram. And they showed, I don't know if it's neurons, ions, eons, whatever they are. But if all the positive ions were going in the same direction and the negative ones were, you had weightlessness. You had that zero, like kind of when you were saying that, that's what I was visualizing. But when they're knocking against each other is when it drags you down. There's subtlety to what you're saying. The anti-gravitational effect of a non-charged state, a photon is spaceless, timeless, massless, and chargeless.

21:08When it leaves the Milky Way and comes here 26 ,000 light years away, it arrives the same time it left. So to somebody who's enlightened, there's no time. Timeless mind, ageist body. but whenever you have charge you have space time mass and charge you're living in a conditional state fermions versus bosons they call it in physics and when you do you now are subject to mass i call it mass consciousness versus master consciousness or enlightened consciousness so there is there is a just a beautiful way of integrating the particle physics world with the psychological world, not just as a metaphor, but in deeper levels.

21:49As Erwin Schrodinger in his one mind construct, unminded atoms that he wrote about, he described it. He was a mystic from the Eastern Vedanta, but at the same time, he was a great scientist and gave rise to the Schrodinger equation, which is one of the greatest equations we know in physics. So it was the mystic and the scientists that join true science and true religion don't fight. Pseudoscience and pseudoreligions are constantly fighting. Dr. Demartini, I just want to thank you for doing this. You and I just met over the internet a couple of weeks ago, and you've been super generous to be here just shortly after I was talking.

22:28And I wanted to experience this. I wanted my friends and colleagues to experience it. And I think it's truly remarkable and special. What I just wanted to say was, I thought, okay, that was pretty deep. And it just never ends. and you were like, we're only on column two of 55 or something. Yeah, it was just like we scratched the surface, like how you hold at it and just this dimension, that dimension. It was just really just awesome to just witness and see. And she worked through this path of starting from a deep place of resentment. And I felt that when she said that because we know each other and how you moved her through all the different ways of not seeing this and then having her just to come to the realization that there's a lot of gratitude.

23:09She owes a debt to this other woman, Deborah, because you would not be here had Deborah not set all these things into motion. And I keep imagining that had she not spilled the beans on you, you'd be living with tremendous guilt and would be eating you up inside the entire marriage. And it would crack one way or the other with or without her assistance. And so I think she accelerated your growth. And it's hard to see that because we'd rather blame people. The farther we go into it, the more profound, magnificent appreciation you get. Mm, wow. you