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EP348: Dr. Dawson Church - Spiritual Intelligence For Tough Times · Respark Your Life

0:00
Speaker 1: Happiness studies find that when you get happier,
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Speaker 1: your neighbor gets about 35% happier,
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Speaker 1: her neighbor gets 15% happier,
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Speaker 1: her neighbor gets 6% happier.
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Speaker 1: So happiness radiates out.
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Speaker 1: Your change is the most potent contribution
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Speaker 1: you can make to global change.
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Speaker 1: Spiritual intelligence is so valuable when life is easy,
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Speaker 1: but certainly when life seems hard.
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Speaker 2: - Hello, this is Raymond Aaron,
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Speaker 2: New York Times top 10 bestselling author,
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Speaker 2: bringing you Respark Your Life podcast.
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Speaker 2: the world's premier podcast to ignite the fire to allow you to live life on your own
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Speaker 2: terms. Every single Thursday, I bring you a multi-millionaire world famous celebrity
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Speaker 2: to teach you about the most fascinating ways in order to live a far better life. Every
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Speaker 2: single Thursday, you just need to subscribe by hitting the subscribe button. I'll see
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Speaker 2: you every Thursday to re-spark your life. Yes, this is Raymond Aaron, founder of re-spark your life,
1:02
Speaker 3: and oh boy do we have an amazing guest for you today. His name is Dawson Church, actually Dr.
1:13
Speaker 3: Dawson Church. He is a best-selling author, a scientist, a visionary, and a scholar. Let's go
1:21
Speaker 3: into deeper detail. He's an award-winning writer on the topic of science with three best-selling
1:28
Speaker 3: books to his credit. The first one is The Genie in Your Jeans, which is the first book to demonstrate
1:36
Speaker 3: that emotions actually drive gene expression. People think it's the other way around.
1:43
Speaker 3: His second one was Mind to Matter, which showed that the brain creates much of what we think of
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Speaker 3: as objective reality. You think that objective reality actually is objective reality,
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Speaker 3: like the mountain and the house out there are just real.
2:02
Speaker 1: - And you're mistaken.
2:05
Speaker 3: - Your mind creates it, yes. And then the third one is Bliss Brain, which demonstrated
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Speaker 3: that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness. So if you want to get happy,
2:19
Speaker 3: you don't try to get happy, which you do, well, you'll have to read his book to find out or listen
2:24
Speaker 3: to the rest of this interview. And he has founded the Veterans Stress Solution, which has offered
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Speaker 3: free treatment to over 20,000 US veterans with PTSD. His groundbreaking research has been published
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Speaker 3: many prestigious scientific journals.
2:44
Speaker 3: He shares how to apply these breakthroughs
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Speaker 3: to health and athletic performance
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Speaker 3: through the website, EFTuniverse.com,
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Speaker 3: one of the most visited alternative healing sites
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Speaker 3: on the web.
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Speaker 3: And he's my friend.
3:02
Speaker 3: He's my friend.
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Speaker 3: We both are members of Transformational Leadership Council,
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Speaker 3: which is an association of the 100 most powerful,
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Speaker 3: most important and most well-known leaders
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Speaker 3: in the field of personal growth.
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Speaker 3: So that's the introduction.
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Speaker 3: You now have to live up to all that.
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Speaker 3: (laughing)
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Speaker 1: - Well, every day, Ray, is a joy and a pleasure.
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Speaker 1: And whatever we do, whether we're washing dishes
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Speaker 1: or writing science books,
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Speaker 1: the name of the game is to connect with who you are,
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Speaker 1: live out loud and let that grace just pour through you.
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Speaker 1: So I happily accept.
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Speaker 3: Good.
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Speaker 3: And I happily give.
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Speaker 3: So we're doing what we're supposed to do.
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Speaker 3: But I want to start not with your first three books,
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Speaker 3: but with the next one, which has just come out,
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Speaker 3: which is the purpose of this episode.
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Speaker 3: We're coordinating the release of this episode
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Speaker 3: with the release of your book.
4:00
Speaker 3: And it's called Spiritual Intelligence.
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Speaker 3: That's the book.
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Speaker 3: But this episode is called Spiritual Intelligence for Tough Times, because right now, times are tough.
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Speaker 3: There's lots of things going on, wars, climate, politics, that is worse than we've ever seen.
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Speaker 3: And people aren't able to adjust well.
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Speaker 3: I'm quite wealthy myself, but when I go shopping just for like groceries, I'm shocked.
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Speaker 3: I saw an orange that looked particularly nice.
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Speaker 3: It was the size of a grapefruit.
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Speaker 3: So I was quite interested in the orange until I saw the price.
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Speaker 3: It was eight dollars, eight dollars for an orange.
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Speaker 3: Now I can afford it.
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Speaker 3: I didn't want to pay that much.
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Speaker 3: Like there's so much change going on that I feel attacked.
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Speaker 3: Like I don't feel calm inside.
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Speaker 3: And so let's start with that book because that's what I need.
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Speaker 3: So tell us what's the theme of the book?
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Speaker 1: So the book is called spiritual intelligence. And what I show in
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Speaker 1: the book is that we all inherently have the neurons, the
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Speaker 1: wiring in our brain to connect us with higher states. And we
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Speaker 1: think of these states as being ones that monks and mystics and
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Speaker 1: yogis are able to attain. What neuroscience is now showing us
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Speaker 1: astonishing research in the last 20 years has shown us that
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Speaker 1: Everybody has that basic neural machinery in their head to connect with these higher states.
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Speaker 1: And when you do that, you become resilient. Many of these monks and nuns that we study,
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Speaker 1: they had very difficult times. Some of them escaped from Tibet after the Chinese invasion.
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Speaker 1: Many of them lived in very, very difficult circumstances or faced persecution. And if
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Speaker 1: they're radiantly happy, despite the price of oranges. So how do they get that way? How do we
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Speaker 1: we can get that way and that's what neuroscience is showing us now is as we develop spiritual
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Speaker 1: intelligence turn on those networks in our brain both our mood improves and then our
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Speaker 1: brains literally start to reshape themselves in as little as 30 days and this inoculates
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Speaker 1: you against all the turmoil in the outside world.
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Speaker 1: So that's why spiritual intelligence is so valuable both when life is easy but certainly
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Speaker 1: when life and the world outside of you seems hard?
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Speaker 3: - Okay, well, I'm gonna throw you a hard ball
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Speaker 3: right at the beginning.
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Speaker 3: Usually, I throw you some soft balls to warm you up,
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Speaker 3: but no way, you're such a pro at this.
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Speaker 1: - I want only hard balls, Raymond.
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Speaker 3: - Only hard balls, okay, here we go.
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Speaker 3: Mutual friends of ours, like Jack Canfield
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Speaker 3: and all the other personal growth leaders,
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Speaker 3: they all talk, and I talk about
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Speaker 3: vibrating at a higher frequency and my audience is nod knowingly but Dawson I don't know exactly
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Speaker 3: what it means how do I personally vibrate at a higher frequency does my head bob back and forth
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Speaker 3: tell me from the scientific point of view what does it actually mean so we show you this in chapter
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Speaker 1: of spiritual intelligence and a famous experimenter in the 1950s who worked on
7:30
Speaker 1: developing radar for the British government in World War II. His name is
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Speaker 1: Maxwell Cade and he began to develop the EEG for measuring the vibrational states
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Speaker 1: of the brains of mystics and he built this device called a mind mirror and
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Speaker 1: it's an EEG but it has very specific display and he found that when he hooked
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Speaker 1: people up whether they were shamans from the Central American region, whether they
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Speaker 1: were Taoist masters, whether they were Jewish Kabbalists, whether they were
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Speaker 1: Christian faith healers, whether they were Buddhist monks, Hindu devotees. He
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Speaker 1: found that they all have the same pattern of brainwaves in their brains
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Speaker 1: and that's called the awakened mind pattern. And so we literally can measure
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Speaker 1: your vibrational state of your brain and what you have when you're in the awakened
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Speaker 1: is a highly specific signature of brain waves and an EEG expert can look at
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Speaker 1: those brain waves and they know exactly where you are both emotionally and
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Speaker 1: spiritually without knowing a darn thing about you. They look at your brain wave
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Speaker 1: chart and if you have the awakened mind pattern you'll be in bliss what the
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Speaker 1: Hindus call Samadhi. So you actually are changing the information flows in your
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Speaker 1: brain those vibrational states are just metaphysical. They're actually highly
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Speaker 1: physical and the book shows that when you move into those brainwave states
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Speaker 1: when your brainwaves have lots for example of gamma waves, highest frequency
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Speaker 1: waves, lots of alpha waves which is a bridge between conscious and subconscious
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Speaker 1: experience. When you're in that vibrational frequency in your brain it
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Speaker 1: starts to change and within 30 days in one study I did we showed that people
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Speaker 1: radical reshaping of the neural patterns and the hardware,
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Speaker 1: the anatomy, structural and functional characteristics
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Speaker 1: of their brains in only a month.
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Speaker 1: So it is vibrational energetically,
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Speaker 1: and you feel better when you're in those higher
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Speaker 1: vibrational states, and they show right up on an EEG.
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Speaker 3: - Okay, so from the extremely practical point of view,
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Speaker 3: there is an actual brainwave frequency signature
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Speaker 3: that you can see by booking the person up to a machine
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Speaker 3: and measuring their brain waves.
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Speaker 3: It's real.
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Speaker 3: And in 30 days, they can,
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Speaker 3: I'm putting words in your mouth,
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Speaker 3: so you're gonna have to correct me if I'm wrong,
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Speaker 3: permanently live more in bliss,
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Speaker 3: and I'm putting more words into your mouth now,
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Speaker 3: therefore attracting higher vibration people,
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Speaker 3: higher vibration, higher vibration toys. Am I right?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're gonna care a lot less about the toys. I was
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Speaker 1: on Joe Vitale's podcast a while back and he said, Dawson, can I
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Speaker 1: learn to manifest a $5 million yacht? I said, Joe, yes, you
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Speaker 1: can learn to manifest a $5 million yacht. But by the time
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Speaker 1: you move to that vibrational state, the last thing you'll
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Speaker 1: want is a $5 million yacht.
10:40
Speaker 1: don't care about a lot of the things happening around you in
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Speaker 1: the same way and carrying in the sense of being emotionally
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Speaker 1: hooked by them. And so within 30 days, your brain anatomy and
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Speaker 1: function begins to change. And that's the miracle of
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Speaker 1: neuroscience because we've been able to filter these ancient
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Speaker 1: techniques from the old mystical traditions through the lens of
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Speaker 1: what really works in terms of EEG and MRI evidence. And we've
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Speaker 1: boiled it down to things that are highly effective in short
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Speaker 1: time. Will you be in bliss all the time? No. Will you be hitting
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Speaker 1: peaks of bliss in those meditative periods? After 10-15
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Speaker 1: minutes? Absolutely. So initially, it's the inner light
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Speaker 1: that dawns, inner calm, and the kind of love, Raymond, that you
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Speaker 1: feel when you do this, you sit there, sometimes you tune into
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Speaker 1: love and you feel it flooding through your body. So that's
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Speaker 1: where you are in meditation. After a few weeks of that, it
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Speaker 1: It starts to show up in your outside world and then it's flowing through you, not just
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Speaker 1: into you.
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Speaker 1: And that's where everything starts to change outside of you.
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Speaker 3: Okay, another hardball question.
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Speaker 3: Let's say that I am in this wonderful state.
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Speaker 3: Let's say I'm one of the Buddhist monks type that I just, either I was born that way or
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Speaker 3: or I've read the correct books, or I think positively,
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Speaker 3: surround myself with positive people.
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Speaker 3: Somehow I got there.
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Speaker 3: And I'm addressing a group of a thousand people
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Speaker 3: who wanna get where you and I
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Speaker 3: are just talking about right now.
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Speaker 3: But they're living at a lower level.
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Speaker 3: They're living at shame, embarrassment, hope, whatever.
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Speaker 3: Condescension, thinking--
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Speaker 1: - Despair.
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Speaker 3: despair or saying things like,
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Speaker 3: well, if you're so rich, why are you still teaching
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Speaker 3: and all that nonsense?
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Speaker 3: How do I raise that group to a higher level?
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Speaker 3: If I'm there and I'm a good teacher,
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Speaker 3: how can I get a thousand people there?
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Speaker 1: - As Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see.
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Speaker 1: And what we find when we encounter these teachers
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Speaker 1: is that they are radiant beings.
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Speaker 1: You must feel the love, you feel the goodwill, feel the compassion, feel the empathy pouring
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Speaker 1: out of them.
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Speaker 1: What we also see when we hook them up to an MRI is that the part of the brain that mediates
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Speaker 1: positive emotion is highly active in these people and that the part of the brain is called
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Speaker 1: the insulins, a lobe of the brain right underneath the outer layers of the cortex and it handles
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Speaker 1: emotions like optimism and joy and altruism, goodwill, compassion, positivity, all of these
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Speaker 1: things are brain function.
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Speaker 1: And so what we find in the brains of these masters is that insula is highly active and
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Speaker 1: all of these parts of the brain that mediates spiritual intelligence are active and you
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Speaker 1: feel it around them.
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Speaker 1: So I met masters when they walk into the room, the energy, the whole room lights up.
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Speaker 1: It's amazing to watch that one person is having an effect on 2,000 people in a ballroom and
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Speaker 1: it's possible for one person to be highly influential.
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Speaker 1: So happiness studies find that when you get happier, your neighbor who you may or may
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Speaker 1: not know gets about 35% happier.
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Speaker 1: Her neighbor, who you definitely don't know, gets 15% happier.
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Speaker 1: Her neighbor gets 6% happier.
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Speaker 1: So happiness radiates out of people and as you change, your change is the most potent
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Speaker 1: contribution you can make to global change.
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Speaker 1: If you aren't harboring war and you aren't harboring dislike and you aren't harboring
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Speaker 1: otherness, othering people in you, that spreads out from you and there's a massive global
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Speaker 1: phenomenon now of people moving to these higher states and radiating those virtues out of
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Speaker 1: world around them and it is definitely changing the world. There's plenty of evidence for positive
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Speaker 1: change as well as all the problems that you mentioned and I cover that in the last chapter
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Speaker 3: of Spiritual Intelligence. You know what you just said is so powerful and I've experienced it.
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Speaker 3: You're right one person can enter a room and the whole room glows and it's not a metaphor and it's
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Speaker 3: not woo woo, it's real. Everybody in the room feels better. But is it just a person who vibrates
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Speaker 3: at a high level? Sometimes I look at a scene, a physical scene out there, and I go, "Oh,"
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Speaker 3: and I feel uplifted. Or I hear a piece of music and I cry in joy because it's so beautiful.
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Speaker 3: So is it more than just a high resonating person, but can it be a high resonating music or scenery?
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Speaker 3: Tell me the answer to that.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and we call that in psychology, we call that state happiness.
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Speaker 1: So you have a happy state triggered by nature, triggered by music, triggered by
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Speaker 1: other positive people. And what you want to do, I talk about this in chapter two of
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Speaker 1: of spiritual intelligence is turn those states into traits.
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Speaker 1: And that means that you fire those neurons
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Speaker 1: of state happiness enough to where they wire together,
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Speaker 1: firing together results in them wiring together.
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Speaker 1: Now you actually have the neural material,
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Speaker 1: the neural mass in your brain of wellbeing,
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Speaker 1: of emotion regulation,
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Speaker 1: of focus on something greater than yourself.
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Speaker 1: Now all of those neurons are built in your brain,
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Speaker 1: you're resilient, you're joyful, you're creative.
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Speaker 1: Now you've moved into trait happiness.
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Speaker 1: Now you are a happy person.
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Speaker 1: And then all this stuff happens outside of you.
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Speaker 1: Some of it is very pleasing, some of it's disturbing,
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Speaker 1: but you have this inner unshakable core of wellbeing.
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Speaker 1: And we've measured this now in people.
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Speaker 1: They can move from that unhappy state
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Speaker 1: or only occasionally having a state
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Speaker 1: that's fleeting of happiness to the trait of happiness.
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Speaker 1: You build this in your brain.
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Speaker 1: one in one of the case histories because spiritual intelligence is full, not just of scientific
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Speaker 1: studies, but also people. And one of the people I talked about there, his name is Graham Phillips,
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Speaker 1: he went on a eight week meditation course and really focused on learning meditation and
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Speaker 1: mindfulness. And he was a rich guy, he went into a state of the art lab had all of his brain
17:31
Speaker 1: volume scanned. So at that point, the neuroscientists he
17:35
Speaker 1: was working with knew exactly what the profile of his brain
17:38
Speaker 1: was and what the volume was in each part of his brain. He found
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Speaker 1: himself getting a much calmer as he went through that eight week
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Speaker 1: meditation process, went back in eight weeks, and the emotion
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Speaker 1: regulation center in his brain had grown bigger by 22.8%.
17:59
Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 1: Think about that.
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Speaker 1: He's changed his behavior, he's changed his mind, he's changed his practices, he's become
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Speaker 1: more compassionate, more loving, letting that state and it's now changing the actual structure
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Speaker 1: and neural volume of important parts of his brain.
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Speaker 1: 22.8%, one-fifth bigger in eight weeks.
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Speaker 1: Those are the changes that these elevated states produce in our brains as we move from
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Speaker 1: of that happy state to that trait of happiness
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Speaker 1: and that's accessible to all of us.
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Speaker 3: - So this is like what our mutual friend Marcy Shymoff
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Speaker 3: in her book, "Happy for No Reason."
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Speaker 3: She says that happy for reason is easy.
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Speaker 3: You win a lottery, you're happy.
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Speaker 3: But what you're saying is
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Speaker 3: when you achieve those wonderful states,
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Speaker 3: they become traits.
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Speaker 3: They become not just a place you visit,
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Speaker 3: they become a place you live.
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Speaker 1: - And you wake up every morning
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Speaker 1: and you are happy for no reason.
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Speaker 1: You go to sleep at night, you're happy for no reason.
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Speaker 1: You sit there in meditation, you feel so blessed.
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Speaker 1: You feel your heart just bursting with love.
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Speaker 1: And there's no reason for it other than being.
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Speaker 1: Sometimes I sit there, Raymond,
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Speaker 1: and I just breathe, I reflect on the blessing
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Speaker 1: of simply being able to take a breath in and a breath out
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Speaker 1: and how wonderful it feels just to breathe.
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Speaker 1: I'll take one step this morning after meditation,
19:25
Speaker 1: I went and stood on the wet grass outside my house
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Speaker 1: and just stood there absolutely overcome
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Speaker 1: with joy and gratitude.
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Speaker 1: - Yes.
19:36
Speaker 1: - And it doesn't take anything more
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Speaker 1: than a blade of grass with a drop of dew.
19:40
Speaker 1: - Yes, yes, yes.
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Speaker 1: (laughing)
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Speaker 3: When I wake up in the morning,
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Speaker 3: I go over to the window and I say, wow,
19:51
Speaker 3: like I just can't believe it.
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Speaker 3: And when my wife and I were first married,
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Speaker 3: she said to me, are you like, are you serious?
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Speaker 3: Are you just going to wake you up in the morning?
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Speaker 3: Or is it exactly the same view from the same window
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Speaker 3: a new one every morning?
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Speaker 3: And I said, yeah, I wasn't faking it.
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Speaker 3: I just walked over to the window
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Speaker 3: see what I could see and I was just moved. She said every morning you're surprised at the same view.
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Speaker 1: Every morning is different, every dawn is different, the clouds are different, the birds
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Speaker 1: are different, nature is different and we live in a world of absolute wonder and beauty and it's
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Speaker 1: just trying to fill us with awe at every moment. When you tune within and you connect with your
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Speaker 1: higher power, when you are in these states, these elevated states I describe in spiritual
20:45
Speaker 1: intelligence when you develop that emotion regulation circuit in your brain the way Graham
20:50
Speaker 1: Phillips did in two months suddenly the world is full of awe and beauty and anything to trigger
20:57
Speaker 1: ecstasy so you don't need the five million dollar yacht like Joe Vitale was asking about
21:02
Speaker 1: and you don't really need anything to happen on the outside like you know I happen to drive
21:06
Speaker 1: pretty old cars they're all more than 10 years old and my kids say to me daddy you know you
21:11
Speaker 1: you could afford a new car, why don't you trade in the old
21:13
Speaker 1: clunker? That's like, because I'm perfectly happy with the
21:17
Speaker 1: old clunker. You lose your ambition, you lose your so you
21:22
Speaker 1: know, you still do do things. I mean, I still want to be a good
21:24
Speaker 1: citizen, a good father, a good grandfather, a good steward of
21:27
Speaker 1: the resources I've been given, that all of the anxiety and all
21:31
Speaker 1: of the trying to make things happen on the outside goes away.
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Speaker 1: Because you are in the state in which you're receiving
21:37
Speaker 1: everything you need from that inner space of well being. And
21:41
Speaker 1: neurological because these are neurons that have been built in your head.
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Speaker 1: Now they can't be shifted or taken away from you.
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Speaker 3: I'm bursting with two questions, but they're different, so I don't want to ask
21:54
Speaker 3: them at the same time, but I wish I could.
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Speaker 3: So here's the first one.
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Speaker 3: One of the instructions that I give to people to raise them up is I say, turn
22:03
Speaker 3: off the news.
22:04
Speaker 3: And I personally don't have any ability to resist CNN.
22:11
Speaker 3: [LAUGHTER]
22:12
Speaker 3: The only thing I can do is I don't
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Speaker 3: have a television as my way of protecting myself
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Speaker 3: against the news.
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Speaker 3: So is telling people not to listen to news,
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Speaker 3: which of course is bad news, is that helpful?
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Speaker 1: You want to fill your mind with positive influences
22:28
Speaker 1: because your attention is the most precious thing
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Speaker 1: you possess.
22:31
Speaker 1: That's why they call it paying attention.
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Speaker 1: It is your currency.
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Speaker 1: And you're spending it on something.
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Speaker 1: And you may as well go spend it on things
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Speaker 1: make you feel good and happy. One of the interesting pieces of data I cover in
22:44
Speaker 1: chapter 7 of spiritual intelligence is why people think the world is so bad
22:49
Speaker 1: right now and what we find in massive studies that for example compare all of
22:55
Speaker 1: the words and they can do this now with supercomputers they can compute all of
23:00
Speaker 1: the words that have been published in the New York Times from 1947 to the
23:04
Speaker 1: present day. They can also crunch billions of words published in other
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Speaker 1: news media in other parts of the world and the number of times that words like
23:16
Speaker 1: good, positive, hopeful, helpful over the last decades, almost a century since
23:24
Speaker 1: 1947 has been steadily declining even as the world has been steadily improving in
23:31
Speaker 1: many ways and I list a whole bunch of those in chapter 7 of the book like for example,
23:36
Speaker 1: the average global citizen is three times as wealthy today as he or she was in 1980.
23:42
Speaker 1: We've had this massive increase in global wealth that includes Africa,
23:46
Speaker 1: it includes the eastern countries, it's a phenomenon. It's not distributed equally,
23:51
Speaker 1: but there's been this tripling of global wealth. Global lifespan has doubled in the last century.
23:58
Speaker 1: The number of children who die in childbirth has dropped.
24:03
Speaker 1: The number of mothers who die in childbirth has dropped.
24:06
Speaker 1: Poverty in the US, I don't know what the figures are for Canada,
24:08
Speaker 1: but poverty in the US has dropped by 90%, 90% in my lifetime since the 1950s.
24:15
Speaker 1: So there are all these global measures of well-being which are picked up by hundreds
24:21
Speaker 1: of scientific studies and yet our news media is painting a darker and darker picture
24:27
Speaker 1: of a brighter and brighter actual reality.
24:30
Speaker 1: And it's very easy to get sucked into that.
24:32
Speaker 1: So when you back out, when you take the 30,000-foot view
24:36
Speaker 1: and look at what's really going on,
24:38
Speaker 1: what the science is showing you,
24:40
Speaker 1: you realize we're in a much better world
24:42
Speaker 1: than we realize we are in.
24:44
Speaker 1: Now, are there still terrible problems
24:46
Speaker 1: like global inequality, like income inequality,
24:49
Speaker 1: like gender inequality, like racial disparities,
24:53
Speaker 1: like climate change, like global warming,
24:55
Speaker 1: like species extinction all of these things are absolutely real but you can't fix them
25:01
Speaker 1: by getting all upset like I was part of a group of people that went to Washington DC
25:06
Speaker 1: about in the early 2000s and we had some evidence showing that energy therapies were really
25:11
Speaker 1: helpful for PTSD.
25:14
Speaker 1: We wanted to get PTSD treatments to veterans and we just got completely shut out.
25:20
Speaker 1: They didn't want to hear us at the Veterans Administration and we just got the door slammed
25:24
Speaker 1: in our faces. My colleagues got so angry about this and I got angry too but I did something
25:29
Speaker 1: I started the veteran stress solution. A small non-profit the first year we treated 12 veterans
25:36
Speaker 1: we had 12 therapists who were helping work with people with PTSD. 12 veterans out of
25:41
Speaker 1: the about a million US veterans with PTSD looked like a drop in the bucket but then
25:46
Speaker 1: again the next year it was 70 and the next year was 200. Today it's over 22,000 veterans
25:53
Speaker 1: have gone through the Veterans Stress Solution and the Veterans Administration that slammed
25:58
Speaker 1: the door in my face all those years ago now accepts and we train people there in India.
26:05
Speaker 1: So get mad is one thing, but get effective because what we find with spiritual people,
26:12
Speaker 1: with people in these mystical states, they come back down to earth and they do stuff.
26:17
Speaker 1: They protest, they donate, they start nonprofits.
26:20
Speaker 1: The number of non-profits being started today is five times as many as were being started
26:26
Speaker 1: by people in 1980.
26:28
Speaker 1: There's been this explosion of charity.
26:30
Speaker 1: The Giving Pledge.
26:31
Speaker 1: Billionaires agreeing to donate their fortunes to charity.
26:35
Speaker 1: Not to their descendants, not to their heirs, but to charity.
26:39
Speaker 1: Many of the world's most prominent billionaires have signed the Giving Pledge.
26:43
Speaker 1: There's also the Giving What You Can Pledge for people of more modest means.
26:46
Speaker 1: There are so many positive changes in the world.
26:48
Speaker 1: And again, we're not dissociating or pulling the blinders over all of the bad stuff going on,
26:55
Speaker 1: but we take effective action on it. And that's what people with spiritual intelligence can do.
27:01
Speaker 3: Now I want to ask you the other question, because you handled that one so brilliantly.
27:05
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you what I do, and then I want you to like comment on it or put it in
27:11
Speaker 3: in your scientific terms.
27:13
Speaker 3: The first book that I read that changed my life
27:17
Speaker 3: was "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse.
27:21
Speaker 3: And many of my subscribers may not know the book,
27:25
Speaker 3: but it's a book set in India.
27:28
Speaker 3: There's a boy Siddhartha and his friend Govinda,
27:31
Speaker 3: and they search their entire life for enlightenment.
27:34
Speaker 3: And right at the end of the book,
27:36
Speaker 3: they accidentally meet after all these years,
27:40
Speaker 3: and they hug and they're crying
27:42
Speaker 3: 'cause they're so nostalgic
27:45
Speaker 3: and they sit beside a river
27:48
Speaker 3: and whammo, they get enlightened.
27:50
Speaker 3: (Dawson laughing)
27:51
Speaker 3: Like last page of the book.
27:53
Speaker 3: And I have just bought a property.
27:55
Speaker 3: I live in this three-story luxury log cabin
27:58
Speaker 3: and we have a river actually going through our property.
28:02
Speaker 3: And Dawson, I have infused my river.
28:09
Speaker 3: I say to that river, you're the river in Herman Hesse's book.
28:14
Speaker 3: You're the river.
28:15
Speaker 3: I've given it sacredness.
28:17
Speaker 3: I've given it the ability to transform lives
28:21
Speaker 3: and to make me an enlightened soul.
28:24
Speaker 3: And every time I wake up in the morning and I see my river,
28:27
Speaker 3: it's not just water rippling by,
28:30
Speaker 3: it's that river from the books that are there.
28:33
Speaker 3: So what have I done?
28:34
Speaker 3: I mean, sounds good to me,
28:36
Speaker 3: but do you have a scientific explanation for what I did?
28:40
Speaker 1: - Again, whatever we can use to spark these states
28:43
Speaker 1: inside of us is highly useful.
28:45
Speaker 1: And in my books, I talk about seven meditative styles
28:49
Speaker 1: and that is a meditative style
28:51
Speaker 1: that's really been resident for you.
28:53
Speaker 1: And people say, which form of meditation is best?
28:57
Speaker 1: And I reply, it's the one that really works for you.
29:00
Speaker 1: So you have your river.
29:02
Speaker 1: For some people, my wife, for example, for Christine,
29:04
Speaker 1: she loves yoga and yoga is really the way she moves to those higher states.
29:10
Speaker 1: 75% of people who do yoga wind up having mystical experiences clairvoyance,
29:15
Speaker 1: clairaudience, psychokinesis all of these things so that's for some people that's it.
29:20
Speaker 1: Other people it's reading the sacred texts. Some people it's sitting
29:24
Speaker 1: quietly. Some people it's following their thoughts. So find that style of
29:29
Speaker 1: meditation that works for you and if it's your river then do it. But whatever
29:33
Speaker 1: it is make sure you pick one and then stick with it for a while. Really do that
29:38
Speaker 1: form of meditation. At the end of each chapter of Spiritual Intelligence we
29:43
Speaker 1: have what are called extended play resources with free links to downloadable
29:48
Speaker 1: meditations, to downloadable resources, to Spiritual Intelligence podcasts and
29:54
Speaker 1: videos. We really want you to pay attention to this and develop it in you
30:00
Speaker 1: And Raymond I can bet that as you've been doing that exercise with your river those neural circuits are
30:08
Speaker 1: Triggered repeatedly the growing and the becoming stronger and that's allowing
30:14
Speaker 1: To channel that that that state and not not becoming reliable
30:19
Speaker 1: It's there for you regularly and it's just your your new baseline after a while people experiencing these states start to stay in those states
30:26
Speaker 1: even when they're in the grocery store or they get fired or the economy is in a downturn or they lose their job or
30:33
Speaker 1: they have an argument or a divorce or a
30:37
Speaker 1: interpersonal dispute with a family member. Now we are these resilient people and so whatever your meditative style is whatever works for you to trigger
30:45
Speaker 1: these states spark that neural growth and
30:48
Speaker 1: then in chapter 3 of spiritual intelligence
30:51
Speaker 1: I talk about the tipping point. You spark that neural growth, you fire those neurons again and again make them bigger and stronger
30:58
Speaker 1: reach the tipping point and when you do that
31:01
Speaker 1: suddenly you've turned a state into a trait and the evidence shows that
31:07
Speaker 1: the large from large-scale study shows that people are doing this globally right now
31:13
Speaker 1: there are about 20 times the number of meditators in the world today that there were in 1980.
31:18
Speaker 1: So in 40 plus years, we have 20 fold increase the number of people
31:24
Speaker 1: Experiencing these states and it's starting to show up in all kinds of research data
31:29
Speaker 1: That people are very very different from the way they were in the 50s and 60s. So do it for yourself
31:35
Speaker 1: Be with your river find whatever is your personal river
31:39
Speaker 1: What sparks you do that regularly and become one of those people who's experiencing these states regularly?
31:44
Speaker 1: your brain again has all these networks to experience bliss and joy, it's just a matter
31:50
Speaker 3: turning them on. I've lived here for four or five years since the lockdown and I've never meditated
32:00
Speaker 3: in my life. I've tried to and it just doesn't work for me and I just realized just from what you're
32:05
Speaker 3: saying state to trait that I just started meditating six months ago. I just like started one
32:11
Speaker 3: day and I can do it. So you're right. I see, I love this interview. I mean, I've always loved you
32:21
Speaker 3: and I always love listening to your talks. You're always so very wise, but you seem to have gone
32:27
Speaker 3: deeper in this interview and revealed the inner secrets that you've learned through your scientific
32:35
Speaker 1: research. We have these circuits in our brains and most people have them dormant.
32:41
Speaker 1: They're disabled by stress. When we're stressed they're shut down but when we
32:46
Speaker 1: reduce our stress and turn them on then they start to grow and they start to
32:51
Speaker 1: further reduce our stress. So it's all a matter of just loving yourself enough to
32:54
Speaker 1: make that time to focus on the positive and making it a regular practice. Do that
32:59
Speaker 1: and you change inwardly initially but after a while you see your whole life
33:04
Speaker 1: starting to change as well.
33:05
Speaker 1: You become one of those radiant beings
33:07
Speaker 1: that does lift the whole room up when you walk in.
33:11
Speaker 3: - My dear friend Dawson,
33:14
Speaker 3: the sacred river part of my brain has grown.
33:20
Speaker 3: That's what I've taken away.
33:22
Speaker 3: And I am happy and negative things do happen to me.
33:26
Speaker 3: And I don't go into the dumpster when they do.
33:31
Speaker 3: my subscribers the best way to get your book.
33:35
Speaker 1: Definitely go to my website spiritualintelligencebook.com
33:42
Speaker 1: So you have to make sure the word book is on the end of it.
33:45
Speaker 1: spiritualintelligencebook.com and grab a copy of the book.
33:48
Speaker 1: You can also get the first two chapters for free there.
33:51
Speaker 1: So while your book is arriving, you can read the first two chapters for free there.
33:55
Speaker 1: There's also a video there and then through the book,
33:58
Speaker 1: There's access to all kinds of meditations and other free resources. So spiritualintelligencebook.com
34:05
Speaker 1: That's the first place to go. There's a lot more you can do beyond that point, but just go to spiritual intelligence book
34:11
Speaker 1: Download those freebies get the book
34:15
Speaker 1: Just absorb the information the stories of people the moving stories of people who apply spiritual intelligence in their lives
34:22
Speaker 1: There are stories of people in the Holocaust, there are people, stories of people who were shot, who were wrongly imprisoned for decades
34:30
Speaker 1: and still had this spark of spiritual intelligence that utterly transformed their lives and those of those around them.
34:36
Speaker 1: So there are lots of inspiring stories in that book and you want to really steep yourself again in positive media like spiritual intelligence.
34:45
Speaker 1: And again that start is www.spiritualintelligencebook.com
34:50
Speaker 3: Dawson, you blew me away.
34:54
Speaker 1: [LAUGHTER]
34:55
Speaker 1: When you said 20 minutes max, Raymond,
34:57
Speaker 1: I knew we were going to go much, much over that time.
35:00
Speaker 1: [LAUGHTER]
35:00
Speaker 3: We had one overtime.
35:01
Speaker 3: That's great.
35:03
Speaker 3: We have.
35:04
Speaker 3: And part of the joy of being in Transformational Leadership
35:07
Speaker 3: Council together is we get to actually see
35:11
Speaker 3: each other in different exotic places in the world
35:14
Speaker 3: every six months.
35:15
Speaker 3: So the next time we meet at one of our wonderful exotic local
35:19
Speaker 3: locations, please save a spot for me high up on your hug card.
35:26
Speaker 1: Oh, definitely. I love hugs. I love long hugs. I love meaningful
35:30
Speaker 1: connected conversations. So you're good for all those.
35:34
Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
35:39
Speaker 3: Wow, I sure hope you enjoyed that fascinating episode. Please
35:43
Speaker 3: make sure you subscribe and please tell your friends if you
35:46
Speaker 3: like it, that they will probably like it as well.
35:49
Speaker 3: For your information, this experience, this service,
35:54
Speaker 3: this podcast has been sponsored
35:56
Speaker 3: by the Orbit Coaching Program.
35:58
Speaker 3: All of my friends, all my world famous speaker friends,
36:01
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36:03
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36:05
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36:14
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