We create our own suffering because we have unrealistic expectations on ourself
and other people and on the world around us, to be a one-sided world,
or to live in our values as if the world's supposed to live and read our mind
and know what to do according to our fantasies.
Anything that is extremely pleasureful or painful in our perceptions can
distract us from our mission in life.
Believe it or not our mission is an objective, and objective is neutral.
Neutral doesn't have pleasure or pain perceptions.
It has the balance of the two, objectively.
That's why the Stoics and some of the great philosophers said that when you're
planning real objectives, you're premeditating on the so-called evils,
the downsides, the challenges, the obstacles, in advance and preparing for them,
so you're not sideswiped by them unexpectedly. You have foresight,
you think them through, you think out what the repercussions are,
you plan ahead, prepare for what happens and be prepared so you're not reactive,
you're proactive. And when a person does that, when an individual does that,
they're most likely to live an objective life that's achievable.
I say that depression is a comparison of your current reality to a
fantasy that you're setting, an unrealistic expectation that you're having.
If you expect others to live in your values,
or you expect you to live in other people's values,
or you expect a one-sided world or a one-sided life,
you have the keys to leading to depression.
And when you live in your amygdala and you're trying to avoid pain and seek
pleasure, you're trying to avoid predator and seek prey,
you're trying to avoid challenge and seek ease, or difficulty,
trying to avoid difficulty and seek ease. And what's interesting is,
those do not occur. You're not going to get a one-sided world.
There's no way a human being is going to get a one-sided world through life.
If you look carefully in your own life,
you're both sided and the world around you is both sided.
So the fantasy and unrealistic expectation to pursue
the ability to live outside your own values and expect others to do the same and
expect others to be only one sided and you to be only one sided,
is setting you up for depression.
Because depression is a feedback mechanism to let you know that you're pursuing
something that's not highest on your value, that's skewed towards a fantasy,
that has no strategic plan of how to do it, and you're left there in the dark,
kind of. And as a result of that, you're depressed,
and depression is a feedback, it's not a bad thing.
I'm amazed at how many people run to a fricking pharmaceutical company to go
take some drug that's not even proven to be effective, and the stats show that.
I can guarantee, I'm stating that, there's plenty of research to that.
They go run for the drug,
thinking that you're going to do it and the placebo effect gives them some
effect. But the reality is,
that the greatest pharmaceutical company is sitting in your brain.
Do you know that every one of the transmitters and the hormones that the
pharmaceutical company is trying to alter,
the serotonin uptake inhibitors and these kinds of things,
these all are under your control.
You have the power in your mind to control your neuro-transmitters.
If you stack up the benefits of something you've done and you build up your
pride, your serotonin goes up.
If you stack up the drawbacks of what you've done and feel ashamed,
your serotonin goes down.
If you stack up the benefits of what you're about to experience with meeting
somebody, your serotonin will go up
and your dopamine will go up and your encephalons will go up.
If you assume the drawbacks of it, they'll go down, and your cortisol,
and osteocalcin and your norepinephrine will go up.
Anytime you're perceiving more advantages than disadvantages,
certain chemistries go up. Anytime more disadvantage over advantages,
certain chemistries go down and up. You have the capacity,
but nobody's teaching you this. Nobody's teaching you applied physiology.
I think it's insane that we go and we rely on an external world.
We blame things on the outside, which aren't really the cause of our problems.
And then we give credit to something on the outside that we think is going to be
our solution.
And we dissociate from our own causality of our own reality and are not
empowering our life by taking command of our perception, decisions, and actions,
and not living by priority, where we then automatically go into objectivity,
automatically balance out our chemistry. Our chemistry,
when we live by priority our chemistry normalizes, it's homeostatic.
The electronics of the brain and the molecular chemistry in the brain is
constantly trying to homeostate, bring it back into balance.
But every time we're living in our lower values and extrinsically perturbed by
environmental perceptions, we throw these chemistries off.
And then we store those in our subconscious mind.
And then we believe those are reality.
And we hallucinate about what reality is as a result of it.
And we cause this self-deception.
Then we try to live in other people's values that we envy,
and we try to get other people live in our values that we resent.
And we spend all this futile energy, instead of util energy.
Utility is doing something that is deeply meaningful to you that actually serves
and fulfills deep meanings of others.
If we stick to those priorities and we get objective with it by executive
function, we lead and we don't have depression.
You don't have to time for depression when you're doing something that's deeply
meaningful that serves another individual that they're fairly compensating you
for that you're inspired to do.
You don't get depressed unless you're comparing your current reality to a
fantasy about how it's supposed to be.
You don't get depressed unless you're expecting others to live in your values,
and you're judging them,
or you're trying to live in other people's values because you're judging them
upward.
You get inspired when all of a sudden you're allowing you self reflective
awareness and seeing that the people on the outside are you,
and they're reflections of you. You only resent people,
cause they're reminding you of things you feel guilty about in the past.
And you're only admiring people is because you're too humble to admit what you
see in them is inside you and you have it, you admired in you,
but you're too humble to admit it. And the denial of all those sides inside you,
disempower you and keep you from being present and empowered and purposeful and
prioritized. And that's where you're productive.
And that's where your patient also, because your space and time horizons grow.
Depression's an option.
And depression is simply because we're comparing our current reality to a
fantasy.
I've had thousands of people in my Breakthrough Experience program that I've
taught around the world in 65 countries now, and I've had many,
many people that are supposedly under clinical depression and blow that
out of the water in one weekend. And people don't believe that's possible,
but the freaking truth is they can,
but what happens they can giving their power away by infatuating and resenting
things instead of empowering them, their life.
It's insane to let the world on the outside dictate your destiny when you
can let the voice and the vision and the inspiration and the calling on the
inside, determine your perception, decisions, and actions.
You have a brain that does that.
I alwaya say that depression is letting you know that you're pursuing a
delusion, a fantasy with unrealistic expectations,
instead of being authentic to yourself.
The magnificence of who you really are is far greater than all those delusions
that you're imposing on yourself or other people. So I show people,
I have people come in there and they're clinically depressed and I outline,
there's 15 delusions I've seen in the Breakthrough Experience, I outline,
I explain,
and I have them point them out and show them where their depressions are coming
from. And when they do it, I show them exactly what to do to dissolve them.
And there's absolutely no reason they have to be sitting there and living in
And distractions is a by-product of that because when you're in your amygdala
and you're trying to avoid a pain and seek a pleasure,
that's not possible to obtain, pain and pleasure is conserved through your life.
You're going to have it all your life. Samuel Beckett,
the Nobel prize winner emphasizes, Anaxagoras 2,600 years ago demonstrated.
We're not going to get a one-sided world,
looking for pleasure without pain and peace without war and happy without sad
and kind without cruel and nice without mean, and give without take,
in a world that has conservation laws is delusional.
And I know you've been taught that, but as Dirac said,
we'd been taught so much stuff that isn't so.
All your life you've been hoodwinkled into fantasies of one sidedness,
and then wondered why your life didn't demonstrate it.
When the Buddha said the desire for that which is unobtainable,
one side of a magnet, and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable,
the other side of the magnet, when he said that that's the source of suffering,
it's true.
We create our own suffering because we have unrealistic expectations on
ourselves and other people and on the world around us to be a one-sided world or
to live in our values as if the world's supposed to live and read our mind and
know what to do according to our fantasies.
We have to ground ourselves and realize it has nothing to do with anything on
that outside, except what we decide to perceive, decide to do with it.
That's the power of it.
There's nothing your mortal body can experience that your immortal soul,
the state of unconditional love,
can't transcend and use to its greatest advantage to do something that's amazing
that contributes on the planet that serves.
So I'm a firm believer of taking command of your perception, decisions,
and actions. In my program, the Breakthrough Experience,
I train people on how to do exactly that.
I train them for hours on how to take command of their perception and shift,
no matter what happens in their life,
how's it helping me get what I want in life?
And how can I use it to contribute to greater numbers of people?
How to make decisions and how to be able to be called in to inspired action.
And prioritize your action. It hugely makes a difference in your life.
And there's no reason why you have to sit there in mediocrity when you could be
doing something extraordinary.
So I'm a firm believer that distractions are things we've chosen to see
by splitting our mind into conscious and unconscious sides.
When we're infatuated with something and get distracted by it,
it's because we're conscious of the upsides, we're unconscious of the downsides,
and we're not asking the question,
what's the downside of that before I get impulsively, distracted by it?
And if we're resentful to something and we're frightened it's going to come
towards us like a predator, we're a conscious of the downsides,
we're not conscious of the upsides. Again we can ask the question;
What's the upsides? Neutralize it, not be distracted by it, stay focused.
We have the capacity with the quality of our life being impacted by the quality
of the questions we ask,
in my Breakthrough Experience I have a series of questions inside the Demartini
Method on how to take no matter what happens in your life and turn it into
something you can say thank you for. No matter what,
there's nothing you can experience that you can't turn into saying thank you.
And anything you can't say thank you for is baggage.
Anything you can say thank you for is fuel in life. I've proven that gosh,
thousands and thousands of people who've come to me and they said, 'Well,
this has happened to me.' And I go, 'Okay, how's it serve you?' 'Well,
but it didn't.' I said, 'Okay, well, if you,
if you want to be victim of history, stay stuck in that illusion.
But if you ask the question, I'm not asking you to make anything up,
I'm not asking you to lie to yourself, I'm asking you to look,
you've been so hoodwinkled about the moral hypocrisies of the society around you
and you injected the conformity, ideals and traditions,
and conventions in your mind,
you've been trapped by a box about how it's supposed to be instead of honoring
what it is. And anytime you compare your
life to what isn't, people go around and they go, 'Well,
my life used to be this. I'm hoping it'll be that way.' Instead of going,
this is way my life is, how can I use that to my greatest advantage? We're
not here to live in the fantasy of the past or the fantasy of the future.
We're here to live strategically towards objectives that we are committed to
that are deeply meaningful, that inspire us, that also help serve other people.
That's the mastery of life, that's when we have fulfillment.
Nobody's going to have fulfillment unless they're making a difference.
And that's why innately every human being that I've spoken to and I ask,
'How many of you want to make a difference in the world?' Every hand goes up.
Even in prisons I've seen this. Because it's innate to want to be unique,
to live by our own hierarchy of values which are unique and fingerprint specific
and contribute something original on the planet by giving ourselves permission
to shine as ourselves authentically, instead of being somebody were up.
So if you want depression, try to be somebody you're not.
You want to live an inspired life, give yourself permission to be you.
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