What’s going on people?  I want to talk to you about the different levels of reality creation.  What do I mean by reality creation?  I’m talking about what you have in your life, all the way down to your material possessions, your friendships, romantic partners, and your overall happiness.  Are there things in your life you wish you had but you just can’t seem to get them?  Was there a dream you once had and when you pursued it suddenly you realized it was just too impossible of a dream to fulfill on?

     So often we get excited with an idea.  I remember wanting so badly to be an actor for most of my younger years.  I loved movies and especially loved the way that actors made me feel, as I would be able to experience myself as part of the story.  Being engulfed in a storyline from a movie allowed me to escape from my own reality and the actors were the ones who gave me access to that escape.  I remember in my 4th year of college I was going to pursue this dream.  I became a theater major. 

     I took an acting class and I was doing this scene with a girl from my class.  All my energy went into memorizing the lines and imagining what it would be like once I became this famous actor that everyone adored and revered.  Until both of us had an opportunity to rehearse in front of the class.  I was terrified. I memorized my lines and was somewhat ready.  I remember the uncomfortable feelings throughout the entire time we were acting out this scene.  I felt like everything I did was so unnatural and not believable. 

     Afterwards I was pretty distraught.  I hated the entire process, mostly the tension and anxiety of performing in front of a group of people.  I was mortified, so I stopped going to that class, and all my classes for that matter.  I dropped out of school and I went through what I call a quarter life crisis.  I had no idea what I was going to do with my life and this dream I catered and blossomed for many years all of a sudden evaporated in an instant. 

     How many of you have a similar story?  Where you had this dream and once you started moving towards it you experienced some type of failure.  Typically our negative emotional states take us out of action.  So when I experienced intense discomfort and anxiety while acting in front of my class of peers I realized it was going to be impossible for me to get into character, to be able to actually act when I had this going on internally.  Fast forward.

     When I was 31 I gave it another shot.  It was right after I got sober and I was doing all this work on myself.  I decided I was going to face my fears.  I ended up getting into Community Theater.  I auditioned for a staged reading and all the same negative emotional states I faced 10 years prior were still there.  I was given a role in this staged reading and I remember during the performance the high level of anxiety I felt in front of an audience of 10 people, mostly seniors.  I couldn’t even raise my head.  I had to glue my eyes to the script.  The one time I had the courage to look up two of the old men were sleeping, bringing feelings of inadequacy and lacking.  This staged reading was not a big deal by any stretch yet my mind and body was terrified throughout the entire process. 

     I figured I would just continue doing this community theater acting until the anxiety lessened.  I started doing shows off-script and acted in 4 plays, equaling 24 shows.  Even though I did all that work over a 3 year span my anxiety barely diminished.  When this happens you start asking yourself a lot of questions.  You start telling yourself things like when I said to myself, “I don’t think I have what it takes to be an actor.” Or “maybe I’m just not destined to be an actor.”   The anxiety would never leave me and there was nothing I could do about it.  Isn’t it weird when you start talking about destiny, as if your life is not in your own control?  How many of you actually believe you are in control of your life?  You’re doing all the things you want to be doing?

     Most of us end up settling for a life we don’t truly want.  In order to be able to sustain that realization we have to lie to ourselves, saying yes working for the man in a 9 to 5 job is exactly what I do want to be doing in my life.  Yes I want to be living pay check to pay check in order to survive this world.  We lie to ourselves in order to mask the truth that we don’t know how to be in control of our own destiny. It took until the age of 35 and the following three years to realize why this occurs.  It has nothing to do with destiny.

     You just haven’t figured out the game of life.  The mind determines your reality.  Everything you are dealing with internally somehow finds a way to project itself out into the world around you.  This is what I want to talk about today.  There are six levels of reality creation.  These are the different ways you can shift your reality.  It’s also a hierarchy and the level on top has more power and influence then the levels beneath it.  The top level is called the level of identity and the bottom level is the level of action. 

     A majority of us spend time working at changing our reality through the bottom level of action.  We are taught and raised to believe that the way our reality is created is by actions and actions alone.  Which is true as long as the 5 levels of above you are not blocking your ability to take action.  You are probably wondering “what the hell is this guy talking about?”  I don’t know how many of you are going to listen to this, but for those of you who are, this is some of the most valuable information you will ever get.  So pay attention. 

     Here is how it goes.  The first level of reality creation is action.  You can take action to be able to fulfill your dreams, just like I acted in Community Theater, thinking this would be my access to Broadway or Hollywood.  Yet the next level of reality creation was a bigger determining factor in how far I would go in my acting career.  Because the second level is emotion.  The anxiety I was experiencing before a show and during a show is what would slip me out of character during my performance.  I had no control of when this anxiety would show up.  It was as random as a lightning striking in a thunderstorm. 

     But there are still 4 levels of reality creation.  What’s above that?  Above the level of emotion is actually the level of thought.  Your thoughts determine your emotions.  Wait there is a question to be asked.  Thomas, if you are acting aren’t you just spitting out the lines that you memorized?  Yes and there is plenty of time when I’m not speaking on stage, where the other characters are talking, which for me were always the worst moments.  It was when the anxiety was the highest.  

     There were even moments between lines where the thoughts and anxiety would show up.  For instance, a thought that would pop up would be, “oh crap that wasn’t the right line – you screwed up”, which took me out of character and brought anxiety.  Just so you know, I’m not talking about newly created thoughts.  I’m not referring to conscious thinking.  I’m talking about thoughts that randomly pop up from the subconscious mind.  I’m referencing the 50-80,000 thoughts each of us experiences in a day. 

     Wait a second?  Where the heck do those thoughts come from?  Oh they actually come from level 4 which is the level of belief.  I’ve already had several podcasts around beliefs and beliefs can come in any language.  Often time’s beliefs are developed through two methods.  The first is through repetition, hearing the same information over and over again.  The second way is when we experience high emotion and we use language in those highly stressful moments.  The stronger the emotion the stronger the belief, the stronger the belief the more it dictates our thoughts, emotions and actions.  You have thousands of beliefs stored in your subconscious mind connected to time, space, and reality. 

     Now there is an even bigger level that acts as an umbrella to our belief systems.  These are our core beliefs that are at the heart of our self-worth and value.  Examples are I am not good enough or I am stupid.  We all have them.  You can have a bunch of beliefs linked to a single core limiting belief and of course hundreds to thousands of thoughts associated with all these beliefs.  This is level 5 of reality creation called core beliefs. 

     What is the last level?  The very last level is actually your identity.  Now this is a difficult thing to explain because you don’t have just one identity.  You have many identities often called ego identities.  There are these characters that are developed to help us in some way, shape or form.  It’s almost as if they are severed from the psyche of the mind, sometimes during stressful events, other times through repetitive action.  

     Some of them serve us and some don’t.  An example of an ego identity I discovered for myself is the loser identity.  The character would show up at different times.  For instance, if I saw a pretty girl it would send a thought in my head like, “dude she is way out of my league.” Or “There is no way a girl like that would want to be with a loser like me.” 

     This might sound a little bit out there but these ego identities are parts of us that show up throughout the day.  It sounds very much like multiple personality disorder, which is now called dissociative identity disorder, but it’s not much different.  You want to know what happens with DID?  We all have many identities and sometimes these identities dissociate, like becoming completely detached from main part of the psyche and you are no longer are in control of these identities.  When you have DID and a dissociative identity shows itself to the world, people with this disorder have no recollection or memory of this identity showing up.  It’s a pretty wild phenomenon. 

     What you need to get is that every single human being has these identities and we can observe them and have memories associated with these identities even though these identities are partially split from the psyche and serve a specific purpose.  They can take control of a situation.  We can usually take back control whenever we want, but most of the time they take control until the damage has already been done. 

     Some common identities I see in my line of work is the victim identity and the angry or aggressive identity.  These both show up as a form of survival or protection.  Actually all identities are created as a means of survival.  We have hundreds of these identities and if you spend time meditating or increasing your awareness you can start noticing these characters. 

     I work with my clients and the two things I’m primarily looking for are identities, core beliefs or other limiting beliefs.  It’s amazing how in a simple 20 minute conversation I can find one of those three things and in an additional 30 minutes we can transform it. 

     Alright so let’s summarize this so you can understand it a little better.  The six levels of reality creation actually are all intertwined.  Your identities create beliefs, beliefs create your thoughts, thoughts create your emotions, emotions create your actions and actions determine your results.  The top two levels of identity and core beliefs are the biggest influencers.  They can work together, but they also work independently.  If you integrate an identity back into the collective whole of the psyche or if you reverse a core limiting belief then you will shift thousands of other beliefs, thoughts, emotions and actions. 

     So you can shift your reality at each level and as you go up the levels the easier it is to influence your results because even though you clear something at level 2 when it comes to emotion, there could be other beliefs in level 4 impacting your thoughts and emotions.  Finding a core limiting belief or an identity is like finding gold at the end of the rainbow.  How determined are you to search for the gold?  How many of you stop believing there is gold at the end of the rainbow because someone told you there wasn’t? Not many of us end up at the end of rainbow to prove that statement either true or false.  

     What if there actually is gold at the end of the rainbow and you just gave up on the riches because along your search you developed a limiting belief that took you out of action?  This metaphor can actually be applied to all your dreams.  Something stops you from achieving what you want in life and I just gave you the most valuable information on why that happens.   

     All that I just shared with you is gold.  Because most of us are working at level 1 – at the level of action.  The only technique you can use in this level is willpower.  How far has willpower gotten you?  Most people give up on that ideal body, their own business and whatever else because it’s like climbing to the top of a cliff through a rampaging waterfall.  Hundreds of gallons of water falling on top of your head every second as you try to climb up the slippery rocks.  That’s what it’s like to achieve a result using willpower. 

      Now what if you could get to the top of the giant cliff in a helicopter?  That’s like working directly with core limiting beliefs in level 5.  How about being directly teleported to the top of the cliff?  That’s what happens when you work at the level of identity in level 6. 

     This quarantine has allowed me to have massive growth and transformation.  How?  I am spending two hours a day with my friend slash coach Kelsey from Canada.  We are both trained in NLP and we are clearing limiting beliefs and integrating parts at a massive rate.  Everyday I’m clearing a couple limiting beliefs and integrating two or three parts back into the collective whole.  No one is going to be able to recognize me when this quarantine is over. 

     It’s going to be as if I teleported myself into a completely different reality that is going to be beautiful and magical.  I’m generating wealth, love, joy and happiness in my reality.  I have big dreams and every time I clear a limiting belief or integrate an identity that isn’t serving me back into the whole I’m getting that much closer.  We all have the ability to create our own realities.  You just need to learn how to do it.  Take care everyone and be safe.