Lessons - How To Master Your Life | Dr. John Demartini - Human Behavior Expert, Author & Speaker

In this episode, we discuss mastering knowledge across various fields, the importance of curiosity and how to absorb, retain, and apply information efficiently. You'll discover strategies for expanding your learning potential, building a broad foundation of knowledge and connecting insights from different disciplines for a deeper understanding. Tell us about your learning process and how you go about becoming an expert in so many different fields that have some similarities but ultimately are not in the same lane, because I think that's what's the most impressive thing when I look at your body of work. Well, thank you for seeing that. When I was 18 years old, I had a number of objectives that I went out for. And a gentleman when I was 17 mentioned the word universal laws, and that sounded kind of cool. And at age, age, and I watched David Cairdine on Kung Fu, and he talked about his so-called master that I thought, wow, I'd like to be a master. And those two things stuck in my mind, I also was told by the gentleman when I was 17 about waking up genius. So I had a dream at 17 and then again at 18, to want to master my life and to study universal laws. So I went in the dictionary and I said, what's a universal law? And that led me to natural laws, my Aristotle, that led me to the study of the low ghosts, which was the study of reason in the universe. And then I realized that that was the source of all theologies you could study. So it could be any discipline that an individual could study was under that category. And so what I went did, I went through the dictionary, and it's like it'd be, and look for every knowledge. Maybe a discipline a person could study. Because I figured if I was going to build a body of knowledge, I would want to have a foundation of the most consistent principles that were found throughout the different disciplines. So I'm enlist of all the different disciplines andologies you could study. I still have that list on my computer today. And I made a commitment to read a hundred books in each one. So I just say, I'm going to study these things and I'm going to read, you know, I'm going to try to go to the original thinker who is the founder of that discipline. So I want to study, you know, magnetism, I've studied Gilbert. If I want to study a different field, I go to the founder of that field. As strong, I mean, I mean, I'm going to go back to Naxeman, the Greek philosopher, for instance. And I started to vow, or as much information, because I figured that an average PhD would get about, read about a hundred books. And if you start stacking up PhDs, you'd end up with a hundred books in each field and they'd overlap after a while. There's a lot of duplication. So that was the dream. I want to do it because I want to have a body knowledge that was solid. And I wanted to have polymathic understanding. I want to be an auto didactic polymath. And that really was inspired by Renata Carr when he was reading the European philosophers in the Western world. There was a textbook that had any mention that he wanted to be a man of letters and he wanted to have a universal knowledge and stuff. As cyclopedias, say, some people called him. And I made a commitment to write an encyclopedia. The idea I did wrote an encyclopedia with another fellow that took 20 years to do. And so I decided I was going to do that and work 30 pages a day on this massive piece of work that I wanted just so I could have a better knowledge. I started reading eight complete sets of encyclopedias from color to cover to try to get a better understanding of this. But I want to find the most universal loss to build a body of knowledge with. That was the original objective. And so now after 30,662 books, I keep records of. I have been doing that and people go, well, that's insane. Why would you want to do that? You know, one specialty is, you know, sufficient. And I was told all the way through this and, you know, you got a special. I just got a special. I said, well, okay. But if I specialize and I work a hundred times more than the other person, I can do a hundred of those. So when I was in the health professional, I studied medicine. I studied dentistry. I studied chiropractic. I studied osteopathy. I studied astronomy. I studied cancer and oncology. I did lectures on ecology. I did lectures on this. I actually spoke to dentists and did conferences for dentists all the way up to the American Dill Association when I was 24. And I spoke at Rice University and University Houston and astronomy. And I spoke on, on ecology to MD Anderson hospital conferences. And people thought, this is a freak. This is a weird character book. He's got something to say. And so this has been my dream. And I kept asking it, how do I more effectively officially retain information and absorb information? And I experiment with all different types of things, you know, from speed reading and photo reading and all kind of things to try to accelerate it. And I averaged in my 20s around four to seven books a day on average, about 19 to 20, 25 books a week. And I started accumulating this, this spotted knowledge. And I wanted to find, I linked everything I studied to the evolution of given consciousness, the maximized human awareness of potential. And so if I was studying mineralogy under geology, I studied geology. And then I would go into the minerals. And I'd look at the microorganisms that are involved in the transformation of minerals. I looked at the minerals that's keylators inside the enzymes inside the physiology to look at the metabolic pathways. And so people go, why are you studying geology? I said, because your energy is going to be based on mitochondria, which are bacteria. And many of them originate as lithophiles and extremophiles. And so I want to know how they metabolized in one of the mechanisms of metabolism to burn a maximized energy. So studying that field was part of one common thing. Maximizing evolution, human consciousness, and maximizing awareness potential and helping people master their lives and evolving consciousness. And so anything, whether I'm studying astronomy, now I'm studying the origins, nuclear synthesis from the Big Bang nuclear synthesis to stellar nuclear synthesis to supernova nuclear synthesis to create atoms that are involved in building the body and studying physiology of how those things work and study. So I broke the body down. I took gross anatomy down until I could take it to the quantum level. And I'm writing right now, it takes book on physics. Now I'm about to present in November. So I'm constantly trying to take it from the macroms of the microhobe and in between to study the most universal laws. I could build a body knowledge that I could, when I deliver something, I can rely on it. So that's been my dream since I was 17-18. I'm just as inspired 50 years later that today, as I was then, to expand my body and knowledge. And so people think I'm kind of a weirdo. My girlfriend calls me a freak. I just got introduced. I spoke at a lockdown university from the lady who heads up to Google and I'm a museum the other day. I'm one of the guest speakers. A keynote speaker's name. The introduce means you're about to listen to a freak. Listen, I think that's not a good intro. First, not a good intro. But I appreciate that what you've done is incredible and probably uncomfortable for a lot of people too. To even look at, right? That's not a comfortable path to accumulate knowledge for a lot of people that say, well, listen, I want to become a specialist in my field. I don't even read like 100 books in that particular topic, let alone 30 plus thousand. So it is, but it just goes to show you that there is no necessity. Well, maybe there are better ways to assimilate knowledge and maybe you've found tricks to be able to go into a book and get the most possible out of it in the shortest period of time. But I mean, ultimately, there are no quick hacks to level up your intelligence, really. I mean, it's been 60, whatever, 50 years of reading, researching, finding new bodies of work to go into, right? Yes, I just never ending. I love it. You know, something happened to me when I was 24. Well, when I was 23, I started into professional college. And the very first day, there was a neurology class. And there was a, there's a mention of Pennfield's homunculus, which is a little image of a creature that shows the different percentages of distribution of neurons to the representing of the different parts of the brain and the centering motor expression. And when I thought I saw the, the stomatic-nathic system of the jaw was the most highly represented part of the brain. And I thought, well, if I'm going to specialize in neurology and joints and the body and stuff with the pedics and things, I'm going to study that. So I went to the library, and I got everything on the stomatic-nathic system, which is a TMJ, Timperman, in the original. And it was very little. And so I went over to the University of Texas, dental school, and I went to their library and started to borrow every book that was there. And I went to the dean, and I said, if I was to specialize in TMJ, what would, what would be in my curriculum and what books and what everything I would do? He said, well, that's all listed down in the bookstore. Go find it and stuff. He went much help, but so I then devoured it. And I read like 400 books on that field. And I got the opportunity to lecture at a little dental study group after meeting this guy at a party. He said, well, don't you come and speak about what you know on this thing? And at the end of it, they said, well, that was three hours of the, you know, Cape Dive. You got a more, and I said, I got plenty. And in their TMJ was kind of a new field at the time. There was only Harold Gale, Ben Nathan Shore, and John Baldwin and a few other people that were leading the field. And I got to meet all these guys. I mean, I got to break bread with these guys. And all of a sudden, he goes, you know, we'd like to have become back. And so for 10 months, every single week, I was doing a presentation of these dentist. And one of them said, we got a Southwest Cranium and other society would like you to speak to. Can you come and present there? And I said, yeah. So I got this opportunity. And then after one guy came from there, he says, I got the Tri-County Dental Association conference. We'd like to have a guest speaker. Great. I mean, I'm 24 years old. I'm not even a doctor yet. But I'm, I'm hanging it. I'm going for it, you know, and I love it. And then I was at this conference, the Tri-County Association. And I was supposed to speak for 30 minutes right after lunch. And they got up and introduced and said, well, we got this young man. He's not a doctor and they like that. He's not a dentist and everything else. But he's going to do a special presentation. And people go, what what? What the hell is this guy? And people started to walk out. I had like a mass exodus of people going, why were we going to sit, we were going to go out and just have some coffee. This is ridiculous. And the guy gets backed up there and he introduces me again. He says, hold on a minute. My introduction wasn't sufficient. You know, Harold Gelb, as you know, at a New York and Nathan Shore, as you know, is written textbook on the field. And John Baldwin right here in Houston, has said they learn more from this young characters than they've learned from their professors. And they said they were the one to recommend him. And so really? So they all stood by the door. That's all these guys are standing by the door with their teams. And I started speaking. And they started to come back and sit down after a while because I, you know, I started talking about this, this the brain started to be in anything. And then all of a sudden, that three of the speakers for the afternoon gave up their time and let me speak for four hours. I got four hour presentation. Wow, here's what was cool. There's the best part. During the presentation, there's a real heckling guy, real skeptic guy. And it just really did was upset that, you know, how dare you let a guy that's not a doctor in our field, be a speaker. And he threw out a challenging question. And how the blue, mysteriously, a photographic image of Gray's anatomy, the answer that I get to give him an answer, I saw this page. And I started to share it and read the page, as he'd been sitting in front of my eyes. I started reading on this page, the top of the thing under this caption, I started reading this thing. And 75, I guess, pieces of paper from all the different attendees, they started throwing paper at this guy and said, let the guy speak with pass land. And when I did that, I went, I didn't know I knew that. And I then learned something really cool about speed reading. There's an explicit memory and an implicit memory and an explicit memory is what you remember what you read. And there's an implicit stuff you went into your brain, and you didn't remember it. But once somebody asked you a question that's highly informative and important, it comes out. And I learned a whole other thing about learning that I didn't know before, that I hadn't read anywhere, that every human being has a set of priorities, a set of values on their life. And whatever's highest on their values and intrinsic value, whatever's low is, it becomes more extrinsic. The things that are lower, you need motivation to get you to do, but the things highest is spontaneously inspired to do it. Once you make a link between the knowledge you've absorbed through your senses and that highest value, it comes to the conscious, it goes from implicit to explicit. And I didn't know I knew things. So then, after that, I said, okay, I don't need to remember while I'm reading, I just need to get my eyes exposed to the page. And then when I need it, and it's important to me, it'll come to the surface. And that was a big turning point at age 24 on, on accelerating. So I started reading one day, I made 11,000 pages of material just to find out what I was capable of doing. And then I used to do presentations or nothing but Q&A just to find out, ask questions. I had no idea what I was going to get involved in. I'd push myself to go onto conferences and talk some things that I hadn't really read about it, but you know, didn't know what I knew. Boom, all this information would come out when I needed it. And that was a major breakthrough and I developed a way of helping people absorb information, retain information, apply it, and use it creatively. And I started teaching kids this and you know, other people, I've gone into colleges and universities, high schools, and stuff to help people absorb information. So that was really a turning point at age 24. So I didn't have any anxiety about learning and didn't really worried about it as people go, why are you doing it? I said, because I want to know. I'm like the man who wants to know. That's all I just love learning. And whether I get to use it immediately or not, I know it's there when I need it.