Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in.  This is Thomas with another episode of the Mind Guy Podcast.  I feel inspired to come back to doing these short episodes.  I hope they are of value to you and thank you for the people who told me I should do more of them.  I want to talk about suffering today because every single human being suffers at some point in their lives and there are many people who suffer for most of their lives because most people don’t know how the game of life works. Maybe you are suffering deeply right now, or maybe you are happy as a clam. I’m sure there are lots of you who are only suffering in a couple areas of life and are doing great in others.   

      Let me say that I just recently turned 40 and it’s apparent to me that life can be really hard, not as a belief but more so as a personal experience.  This is by far the hardest game you can play, referring to the game of life because we don’t understand who or what created the game.  What are we doing here?  Why are we here?  We live in a place where people hurt each other.  Not only that, we live in a place where we hurt ourselves.  The greatest irony of life is how we have a voice in our head that can be so cruel to us at times. We have on average 50-80,000 thoughts a day and for the average human 70% of those are negative.  Why are we designed to be so harsh to ourselves and even others?  

      I suppose the simple answer to that is because it’s the overall premise of the game.  Separation – or said in a different way, the premise of the game is to come back into Wholeness.  The design of the game is to discover that every single one of us is actually just a tiny little aspect of the whole.  Which also implies that you and I are no different when it comes to our truest form.  Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what I just shared made much sense to most. 

     What if I share it in a different way?  What if I were to tell you that everything in our universe is just one big organism?  For example, the planets, stars, meteors, and gas clouds are like organs in the body.  The dark matter which is the space between everything acts like a web, connecting all the bigger objects together so they behave more like the tissues and ligaments and what if we as humans were like bacteria or fungi? Just as our bodies are made of so many different complex components where we allow millions of different organisms to symbiotically live within us for the benefit of the whole.  What if you could see the entire universe as just one single entity and everything inside of it was just tiny fragments of that gigantic organism.  

     Now imagine that we operate more like ants or bees, where there is an intelligence that orchestrates the patterns of the universe.  Gravity could be an example of one of those patterns causing large objects to orbit larger objects like planets around the sun.  As well as the way our planet and other planets rotate on their axes, which is another pattern that allows for life to exist, where we move from sunlight into darkness. What if physics and quantum mechanics are ways to explain the heart beat and the blood flow of the universe?  What if that intelligence worked more like a hive mind?  Where one super intelligent mind is actually in charge of all the tiny little minds of all the species, not only on Earth but on all the planets. Now, what if we named that giant organism God?

      For a moment suspend all knowledge you have about religion, gods from history’s past, false prophets and leaders of current times and most importantly the sour taste all of that may have put into your mouth at some point in your life.  What if the word God is just the most commonly used word for this giant organism?  What if we use a different word to better define it?  Instead of God we used the word Oneness or the word Wholeness.  What if we are all made of the same stuff, but we just took a different shape or form?  Meaning, what if the brilliance of the game is that we all look different and act different in order to give us the illusion that we are separate?  And what if that illusion of separation makes us forget that we are made of the same stuff, therefore it’s much easier to do bad things to each other.  What if we are actually hurting ourselves when we hurt others, because we are the same organism? 

      All of these questions are designed to open your unconscious mind in a way that you may not have allowed before.  What if the only question you ever needed to ask was, “Who am I?”  The reason I share all of this with you is because I received a download nearly 5 years ago.  I call it a download because I’ve heard many other people who have received creative or intuitive ideas in moments of inspiration call it a download.   A download is simply a burst of creative ideas flooding into your thought stream.  Where do they come from?  What if creativity comes from the hive mind?  I know we think we are in control of our lives but from my understanding there is something bigger in control of the entire system and there is a lot of information we are not privy to.   

       I had one of the most creative bursts of ideas flood into my mind when I was traveling from Albuquerque, NM to Denver, CO in the middle of the night.   This was a period of my life when I was living the van life and traveling the country.   I was studying at the Hypnotherapy Academy and I was learning about the mind.  I was able to make these connections that I never could see before.  For the first time in my life I knew why I had  suffered so much in my life.  I also knew why I hit bottom and nearly died when I was 29 years of age.   

       I saw three levels of separation.  I could see different moments of my life and how they all intermingled.  The three levels of separation are very simple.  The first being the separation from self.   Unfortunately life causes us to become fragmented through experiences of trauma also known as negative emotions.  This separation process is done by the mind in order to help us survive and protect ourselves.  It’s an automatic process and through healing, learning and growing we allow the fragmented pieces of ourselves to come back into alignment with the whole.   

      When I say that we are separated from ourselves, it really means we dislike or hate aspects of ourselves.  This usually is associated with limiting beliefs.  Some examples are the belief of not being lovable or not being good enough, or being broken in some way.  The flip side to this is a lack of acceptance in self or rather just merely perceiving the self with some form of lack.  You must understand that once we are in that presence of wholeness, we end up loving ourselves and once we are able to love ourselves it’s much easier to love others.

      This leads me to the second form of separation which is the separation from others.  This is when we separate ourselves from individuals or groups of people.  We could either despise, dislike, or hate others for a variety of different reasons.  The easy ones to point out are race, religion, sex, political affiliation, socioeconomic status and age.  We can also hate people who have maliciously hurt us.  Anytime you cut someone out of your life, it creates that separation.  An example of this could be disowning your son or daughter for being gay.  Now don’t get me wrong, if you are in an abusive relationship, you must find a way to get away from that abuse.

       Going back to the illusion of the game, people cut other people out because of 1) how they look  2) what they believe and 3) what they did to you.  Religion and politics are a great example of that.  There are plenty of people in the U.S. that have biases against Islamic people and there are Islamic people who despise Americans.  Also we have the dynamic of republicans vs. democrats.  What is the result of these factions or groups?  Fighting against each other and oftentimes hating each other.  The game is designed with so much variation that it’s easy for people to get lost in appearances.

     The third level of separation is separation with higher power.  You can use many terms for this including God, Source, Spirit, or even the Universe.  People who feel a strong connection to the universe are experiencing something very similar to people who have a devotion to their god.  Connection is the key word in all of this and if we denounce that higher power, we are pretty much denouncing the whole, which brings a deep layer of separation.   The people who have experienced much hurt throughout their lives, isolate themselves out of safety.  I have notoriously been one of those people and even though I am able to keep up with appearances, there has been a great level of suffering in my life.  

      For those who have become so isolated, discovering a connection to higher power, the universe or even nature, can help you alleviate some of that suffering.  Pets are actually a great way to be connected while living alone and thank goodness for dogs and cats!  They might be the true heroes of this day and age, especially during pandemic times.  

      I discovered for myself that there is a phenomenon that happens when we as human beings experience high levels of mental and emotional pain, maybe even physical, but I haven’t explored that avenue quite yet.  The more isolated you are, the more alone you feel in the world, hence the more suffering you will experience, because suffering is once again being separate in some way.  The individuals who have separated from themselves, separated from others, and separated from higher power will end up in a place of so much suffering that thoughts of suicide will likely pop up.  This is what happened to me when I was 29.  This concept terrifies a lot of people and creates a lot of pain for the people who have lost ones to suicide.  Suicidal thoughts are just another survival mechanism.  Think about it, when you experience so much pain sometimes the mind thinks it’s just best to start over. 

      Through my past life regressions and DMT experiences I got connected to the realization that I’m never going to die.  My body will die at some point but there is some aspect of me, call it the spirit or soul that continues on after death.  I see suicide in a unique way.  If you have ever played a video game and you have some type of avatar that moves throughout the game.  Your main objective may be to shoot the enemy or fight the villains in the game in order to save the world.  On the gaming screen you have a health bar and when you get injured enough times by the enemy, you end up perishing, but you just start over from the beginning.  

     Sometimes people come into this game on one of the hardest settings or maybe they are brand new to the game and die quickly.  If you ever played a brand new game then you can understand this concept of dying really quick the first few times you play it.  So death for me is not as big a deal anymore.  Death is all around us and has been since the beginning of time.  

      The challenge with taking the suicide route is that you can’t escape the same path in the next life.  This is what eastern religions call karma. Meaning in the next life you will likely experience the same negative emotions and limiting beliefs and will deal with the same amount of pain, probably in a slightly different form.  So you might as well try to figure it out now. Why not?  I’ll say more about all of this in another episode. 

     What if it takes many, many lifetimes to win the game? Where in my opinion winning the game is finding unconditional love and acceptance for the self, for others and higher power.  Well let me clarify, this is a pretty long game so all the things I just said about love and acceptance will take you to the next level of the game.  Wherever Jesus Christ and Buddha went to.  How many people do you know that actually reach that status?  This is one of the hardest games you could ever play, because when you are here you have no idea what the rules of the game are.  It seems like we run around like chickens with our heads cut off.  It can be extremely challenging.  

      If you are suffering just know that you are not alone and the reason you ended up in this position is because the pain you experienced in the past is being used by your unconscious mind to protect you from experiencing the same pain in the present and future.  Cutting people out and isolating yourself are forms of protection. The access to ending that suffering is connection and that alone involves a lot of healing that may take many years.  The access to healing the self is through forgiveness and clearing your limiting beliefs and negative emotions.  

     The next step is finding a way to accept others for their ideas and belief systems and trust that you can find a way to love everyone at some point, even the ones who have harmed you. This takes an extremely deep level of understanding and forgiveness.  I’m pretty sure that right there takes many levels to get to.  Lastly, finding a way to connect to the bigger organism, aka god, higher power, the universe, etc.  I promise you, no matter how shitty your life is going, that connection to higher power will get you through some really hard times.  Once again hypnotherapy, timeline therapy, NLP and plant medicines have been the greatest healing agents for myself.  Thanks for listening.