Interview with Dr John Demartini of “The Secret”

One of the most interesting interviews in my career so far is the one with Dr John Demartini, one of the writers and teachers of the best-selling “The Secret” book and film. The interview was done via Skype and, much to my surprise, Dr Demartini was willing to answer even to my most skeptikal questions about the doctrine of “The Secret”.

 [During his first visit to Cyprus next week, Dr Demartini will be holding the  private workshop ‘Secrets to Creating An Amazing Life’ in Hilton Park Nicosia from 18.00 to 22.00. Find more info on  www.kirikion.com/demartini.html]

– Dear Dr Demartini, how does it feel to be a living example of willpower and its life-changing potential? You were physically challenged since you were born, then diagnosed with dyslexia and told by teachers you could never do anything really important in your life. And look where you are now!

I best can say that I am very grateful for the voids that I had in my early life, the challenges physically and mentally/emotionally, they became later catalyst in making want to do something with my life, so I am very grateful, that’s all I can say. I am very grateful for the opportunity to start out with those challenges and then be blessed to find people like Paul Brag and others along the journey that have assisted me in transforming those challenges into opportunities and having those voids that later became my values that I dedicate my life to today. So I am just grateful for the opportunity to do what I love doing.

– Which is the doctrine that you have adapted your life to? We’ve heard about the Secret and many of us have read it, but what does it really mean? What does it consist of and, most importantly, what kind of powers does it evoke?

Everybody has a set of priorities in life, a set of values, things that are most important to least important in their lives. Whenever they set goals and intentions that are congruent and aligned with their highest values, they tend to see opportunity, they tend to act upon opportunity and they are inspired from within to fulfilled what their intention is. They tend to see the synchronicities of people, places, things, ideas and events that help whatever their desire is to come true. So not only do they see and act upon the opportunities that are inspiring to them, but they tend to attract opportunities and notice opportunities in the environment more effectively and have synchronous events bring their intentions into reality.

So we in a sense are attracted to the things we’re attracted to and I think we are those things who are attracted to us, there is a connection and magnetism between the things we intent and the things we fulfill.  Our inner most dominant thought, without a doubt tends to move in the direction that where becomes our outer most tangible reality.

So I am a believer in clear intention, conscious focus and gratitude in heart for the opportunities that emerge to help us fulfill. I always say that what happens in our life is helping us on the way; it’s not in the way.

– What is the scientific explanation of it all? I have heard of your approach that the Law of Attraction derives from Quantum Physics.

According to some scientists and cosmologists, the entire Universe may be a quantum event, initially originating from a singularity in the Big Bang. Some believe as John Archibald Wheeler did, that all events that are going on in the world are quantum events, including the daily activities of humans and the subtle interactions inside the physiology of the humans. I believe that sociologically and psychologically and physiologically, we are all enacting quantum events. So there is deep physics behind the construct of events that occur in our life. There is a parent hidden order in our daily activities that we don’t always see initially and when we perceive through the filter of the principles of the law of attraction we increase the probability of discovering this order and having gratitude and having more synchronous events occur in our lives. So I am a believer not only in the physics of it, but in the principal and practical application of it in the daily life for people. I believe that everybody has the capacity to transform their lives and increase the probability of achieving what they really dream about and there are certain principles that if they follow the increase those odds and if they overlook them they decrease them. So the Law of Attraction or the Principles of Maximizing Human Awareness and Potential have stood the test of time and our job is to awaken those within us. We have the potential all of us to live amazing lives, we just need to apply them.

– Have you ever met people who might consider “The Secret” spiritually or scientifically heretic? How has the Church reacted to the Law of Attraction?

It all depends how the Law of Attraction is presented to the people. Everybody has a set of values or priorities that they live their life by and anything that challenges their values they tend to close down to and withdraw from, anything that supports their value they tend to open up to and embrace. So if a person shares the principles of The Secret and The Law of Attraction and the Principles of Maximizing Human Behavior in a way that is perceived as supportive to the values of the church or science then there is complete openness and receptivity to it. It all depends on how it is presented and how well its thought through when its presented. I have spoken to scientists in very deep levels of physics and studying quantum theory and had them open up to these constructs but if I was to speak in religious terms to a scientist they may not relate to it. At the same time if I quote scripture in a Biblical enthusiast and I use the language that they are accustomed to and describe the principles of The Secret in terms of their construct then they are receptive. So I am only a heretic to the people I haven’t cared enough to communicate in their values. If I care enough about individuals to find out what their beliefs and their values are and then be intelligent enough to communicate what principles I know stand the test of time in terms of those values, then everybody is receptive, I don’t find too many skeptics. But when we don’t communicate well, we don’t know how to communicate in their values and we basically project our assumptions in a way that doesn’t support their values, we get resistance, this is normal, this isn’t just because of who they are its because of the way we presented it.

– There were several writers before “The Secret” in the US, who tried to explain the Holy Bible and The Psalms through the Law of Attraction, like Catherine Ponder for example, who made a fortune out of her “Millionaires of the Bible” series. How much likely is that the Holy Bible was written in a way to be teaching the secrets to abundance, tens of centuries ago?

The principles of achievement have stood the test of time, pre-biblical, post-biblical, modern – it is not limited to any race or creed or color or age or sex. They are just principles that have been observed through the ages that have allowed people to achieve. Now, the principles that have been uncovered in biblical writings having extracted from wise individuals through the centuries some are the same principles. So if a person was to scour the biblical writings and go through it line by line they could easily extract out principles in the bible that would support principles outlined in ‘The Secret’ and the principles of achievement. It’s not that its not able to be done, it just needs to be methodically gotten through.

I have gone through the Biblical writings for many decades now – almost 4 decades – and there is plenty of material in there that is supportive to the construct of ‘The Secret’. It’s just a matter of taking the time to go through it line by line and extracting them out, summarizing them and then presenting them in a way were Christians or Judaic backgrounds will appreciate them. So it’s there.

Catherine Ponder I read almost 30 something years ago and she did her best to try to inspire and encourage people to be more prosperous in her Principles of Prosperity and she knew that many people had Biblical backgrounds so she extracted Biblical statements to help support that and it was very helpful. It helped a lot of people who had Christian and Judaic backgrounds to appreciate that, mainly New Testament students. So I think that you can extract it. But many other texts, not just Christian texts can be done the same way. I have done this with writings from other cultures and I have found that this was very helpful to the culture, because that way you can communicate the principles of “The Secret’ in their language.

– I would like to focus on your physical healing. You were born with serious health problems. You were healed before you got to know “the Secret”?

Well, I was born with a turned in foot and a turned in hand, which was a deformity of the physical and then I had learning problems, basically I couldn’t read when I was young and I couldn’t write very well. I wouldn’t say overly serious like life threatening, but it was definitely challenging. I think that those voids catalyzed me to want to understand the mind and the body. I have written a 750 page text recently, on the relationship of about 800 different health conditions and the underlying psychology giving rise to them and I am very fascinated by mind/body connections and think that had something to do with my childhood. But these challenges are what give us direction in life. Sometimes the greatest challenges lead to the greatest outcomes and I am very grateful for that I started out this way, they were challenges as a young child but now I look back and say thank you. I would say anything you can’t say thank you for becomes baggage and anything you can say thank you for becomes fuel. And so I feel fueled by the opportunity to have those challenges to give rise to my drive to do what I do today. And I hope that encourages other people to take their challenges and turn them into opportunities. There is really nothing in the way, everything is really on the way, it’s just the way you see it.

– Does “The Secret” have actual healing powers? How does it work?

I won’t say that ‘The Secret’ the book or the movie necessarily does, but I will say that the secret healing powers within the individual. When somebody is in a state of gratitude, feeling love, inspired by a vision, enthusiastically acting, poised, present, purposeful, patient and empowered, the power of their immune system, the power of their physiology normalizes and emerges to literally self-govern the body and reawaken the power to heal.

So I am a firm believer that we have the power to heal within us, in fact I’ve seen it so many times it’s not a question. So we want to awaken that power. And the principles of “The Secret’, the principles of great achievement have always helped people feel more poised and powered in their life than somebody who is banging their head against the wall based, striving for that which is unobtainable based on fantasies and unrealistic expectations and defying the laws of achievement. So it’s wise to know what they are, so that you can put them into operation and watch your body respond. I believe that the body is creating signs and symptoms. Symptoms that you can identify and signs that doctors identify, as feedback mechanisms to help us live authentic, inspired, purposeful, meaningful and true lives and when we are not being true to ourselves our symptoms give us feedback to help us become true to ourselves.

– Do you believe that willpower and the Law can heal severe health problems, like cancer?

I’ve had the opportunity to be the president of the Cancer Prevention and Control Association in Houston many years ago and over my career as a clinician I saw many people that had cancer. I can’t say that all people that I’ve ever seen with cancer were able with their mind to completely remiss the cancer. But I’ve certainly seen and definitely experienced watching remissions of cancer and closures on cancer heal. And so you can’t ignore that. There have been textbooks and many different articles written on the remissions of different serious health conditions like cancer.

We now know studying physiology and particularly stem cell research and regressions and decapitulations in the brain and body we now know how this is occurring, we know that the genetics can be activated by the psychology, neuro-hormones and epigenetic factors; we now know that we can do it. And we’ve been watching it, but we are now learning the science of how it is occurring and working gradually towards scientifically been able to reproduce those states.  So with time this will become a norm, the mind and body are so entwine that to ignore the mind in healing the body is a sigh of ignorance, because it’s there and without a doubt spontaneous remissions of conditions have stood through time and now we are emerging how we are going to do this consciously. And this is the beauty of where its is going, I have been watching this now for more than 40 years and I am certain that this is going to emerge more and more as the decades move on.

– Isn’t there a danger for patients who feel hopeless and helpless, to believe in so-called healers who invoke such powers of the Universe? What should they pay attention to so that they don’t become victims of fraud? What about taking their medication?

I think today we have two forms of healing. We have the internal healing that we don’t want to ignore, even in science and scientific journals they acknowledge that at least 25 to 30% of all healing is the placebo effect within the body and the inner psychology of the body and the immune response that we have. We also don’t want to ignore the power of mentorship and experience from people who have been in the healing arts, so it’s wise to incorporate both. Its wise to have diagnostic workups with professionals that know what they are doing, but it’s also wise to incorporate your own self-initiated healing process.

I always say that if a person believes in a particular modality of healing that is probably the one that is going to assist them the most because of their belief. But at the same time you don’t want to ignore a serious health threat by just hoping that something is going to be done by just visualizing it. You want to be able to use your visualization, your affirmations, your thinking process, your nutrition, your meditation, in addition to the orthodox approaches to health care. I think you need both.  I think there is an entire scale of health regimes that a person can follow and I recommend that go to the most conservative first and work their way up to the most radical last.   But I do believe we need both, science and the psychology together to work as a team. The reason why we have parents teaching children is the same reason that we have mentors or health professionals guiding us, so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and learn. But at the same time the power to heal is still within us, that’s where the source is, so we have to awaken our own inner powers along side.

– Which is “The Breakthrough Experience” you have been teaching around the world? What is it that makes it “breakthrough”?

The Breakthrough Experience is a program that I started over 22 years ago, I have shared it in about 60 countries, I taught it now at least 40 times a year all these years and it’s my way of doing for others what the gentleman when I was 17 did for me: help me identify what my mission is, help me identify what I really want to dedicate my life and energies to, help me clarify what my objectives in life are, my dreams, my aspirations, help me strategize on how to accomplish things. How to breakthrough fears and guilds and emotional baggage that is stopping me. How to basically dissolve conflicts within me and around me, that are disturbing the pathway. How to breakthrough and empower all seven areas of my life because I believe that any area of our life that we don’t empower, someone else will overpower. How to empower our spiritual quest, our mind development, our career, our financial power, our family, our social, our physical health power. How to empower all areas and expand our awareness and potential in each area.

The Breakthrough Experience is two intense days breaking through anything that’s in the way of what you really truly would love to dedicate your life to. It’s an inspiring, amazing two days where I just help people from 8.00 in the morning until midnight and again from 9.00 in the morning until 7.00 do everything and anything we can to make them go to new levels and function from new empowered states.

– Do you charge for your lectures and workshops? What if someone is desperately in need to attend but can’t afford them?

I believe that everybody deserve to have fair exchange. I believe when somebody says they can’t afford something then maybe they don’t have money but they have some other service that they can provide to have fair exchange. I don’t believe in rescuing people, I don’t find that that makes them anything but enabled and disempowered.

I believe that everybody if they can walk, if they can talk, if they can move has something to offer, a service in exchange for a service. I do believe that different people at different levels of socio-economics do require different levels of education and different types of education. So I have attempted to put programs together for people who have been less advantaged and let them find ways of having exchange, maybe it’s in other forms of services. I

I have done programs for young adults ‘Inspired Destiny’ in South Africa for people in townships who make only 200 dollars a year and we found ways where they can do various types of services in exchange and given them the opportunity to educate.

I also provide books and CDs and DVDs at lower cost for these individuals. And also things on the internet for free and webinars for free every week or so. I try to do something at all levels, so people have the opportunity to move up and grow. There’s never a limit on us, except the limits we decide to keep in our lives.

So I try to work at all levels, I try my best to try to share with as many as I can, but the fact is it costs money to do things, to put on programs, to produce books, so we have to be real, but I try my best to do this at all levels of society, that’s my mission.

– You have gained fame and a great fortune by applying the laws of the Universe to your life. You live lavishly, which you deserve thanks to your hard work of course. Now you’ve reached so high, do you ever feel the need to offer to the less fortunate in material goods? Do you do charity? Do you believe in it?

I am a believer in philanthropy but I don’t believe in giving something for nothing. I believe that causes a robbing of dignity, accountability, responsibility and productivity to people. So I don’t just rescue people, I educate people and help them become self-sufficient and I crystallize and catalyze inspired action in people to help them take on their own accountability so that they can be standing  on their own two feet.

I am a believer in education; I don’t just send money for somebody just to eat without also educating them. I do a lot of complimentary services in that way, but I make sure that they do something, even if it’s paying forward or if it’s sharing it with the next person or if they basically do something of a service to some other person.

But I am not a believer in just rescuing people out of desperation unless there’s been what we could call natural acts like earthquakes, tsunamis and things that they have no real command over. In those cases then I am very charitable in that respect.

My charity and my foundation and institute are dedicated to education primarily. I always say that if you teach a people how to fish you feed them for a lifetime, if you give them a fish you feed them for a day. So I am a believer in that.

I also see people that are in destitution, in desperate states economically, that unless they learn the art of managing their money and appreciating and being of service to other people, they will stay there.  You don’t have to stay poverished. I have worked with teenagers that don’t have parents and show them how to become viable and self-sufficient and I would prefer to teach them how to do that so they have dignity and go and bring a service and grow the culture, than just rescuing them and feeding them and letting them multiply without having a contribution back.

A person that has tears in their eyes of gratitude for being able to provide service to others and be able to stand on their own two feet is a worthy cause and inspires me, so again education is my primary focus. But there are different situations and different parts of the world that I have been able to contribute philanthropically to, some are education, some are food supplies, some are water supplies, some are health care supplies, all different kinds of things

–  What would the people who attend the two seminars you will present in Cyprus expect to see and learn?

The program that is sponsored by the  Bank of Cyprus on the 23^rd of May between 7.00 pm and 9.00 pm at their head offices which is on Business and Financial Development in Times of Crisis, I will do exactly what the title implies. I will show people how to develop their business more effectively and efficiently, so they can actually produce more profits. I’ll show them from a psychology basis and from a strategic basis, how to make more probable economic returns and grow and spread and enable themselves to build their business.

I will also show them how to manage their money in ways that they will have more profits and to able to grow and attract more business and be able to save and invest and build wealth for themselves so that can then be a pool of inspiration and financial resource for others.

I will also teach them how to expand their vision and give themselves permission to make global impact, because if they play small they will create small outcomes.

On the second program the 4 hour Workshop on the 24^th of May from 18.00 to 22.00 at Hilton Park on the ‘Secrets to Creating An Amazing Life’ I will outline principles that have allowed people to do extraordinary things and literally live an amazing life, including my own journey.

I will be talking about how to maximize human awareness and potential and how to empower all 7 areas of life, spiritually, mentally, career, financial, family, social and physical.

I will be talking about how to develop themselves financially and in business and I will be basically showing them how to appreciate and love their lives and appreciate and communicate in other people’s values so they can enhance the expansion of their contribution to the world.

Its going to be absolutely inspiring,  I am absolutely certain that they are going to be inspiring programs both of them.

There is no way they could come without going away with practical inspirational gems, that they can use the rest of their life  in growing their business, and their life, and their wealth, and their relationships!

– A message to our readers….

No matter what you’ve been though, no matter what you’ve gone through, no matter what you are going through, you are worthy of living an inspired life and you deserve to have an inspired life. So you must to give yourself permission to do something extraordinary with your life.

In the two programs I am coming to present I am going to show people how to live an extraordinary life. I am going to show them how to expand and give themselves potential and permission to do that, because so many people play small and don’t give themselves permission to be really contributive to the planet so I am going to show them how to do it so they can play a bigger game.

They deserve to have an amazing life, I’ll show them whatever steps that will help them do that.

So just know that if you are out there reading this, know that you deserve to be doing what you love and loving what you do, grateful for your life, inspired by your dreams and your actions, achieving what you really would love to do and doing it with the people you really care about.

You also deserve to have the fortune that you desire and there’s a way of doing that, so I will show you how to do that so you can live the life that you really are inspired to live.