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

John Demartini (0:00)

Negativity 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.

Rich Cardona (0:16)

Hey, everyone, welcome back to The Futur. I'm Rich Cardona, the show's producer, and this is part two of Chris' 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 toward someone who blew up her marriage and ended, somehow, in gratitude. If you missed it, it's one episode back and definitely worth your time for context. In 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 sure positive thinking that came out by his own math to exactly zero.

Here's part two.

Chris Do (1:01)

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.

John Demartini (1:14)

When I turned 18 years old, I was living in Hawaii as a big wave rider or surfer, and I left there and I came to Texas to visit my parents. 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. 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 amount of things over in foreign life. When I was first grade and I didn't read till I was 18

I got inspired and I started back, and my parents bought a set of books, a little triplet book by Norman Minson Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking.

So I read this book and I thought I need to be more positive. 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?

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. So it's starting at age 20 I started attending seminars. I went to a live seminar with Norman Vincent Peel. 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 balance out my negativity. And I was the only one plodding. 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, right? 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, a 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, we know so much that they didn't sell. We're taught misinformation. Political and theological systems like to be in the guilt producing control business. They 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. And 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 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 negatives and integrated them in our mind. Could we liberate ourselves from the intrusive thoughts and the things that occupy space and time in our mind that run our lives.