Silence Means Consent | Whose thoughts are these?

Today's podcast aims to provide you with comfort and explain another essential step to consciously deconstructing your blocks, fears, and thoughts. I'm Mário Portela, and this is the eighth episode of my podcast. So, grab a seat on the virtual couch and come have a chat with me!

What is Silence Means Consent?

We're about to embark on a mind-blowing journey of self-discovery and empowerment.
Demystifying and presenting new perspectives has always given me an incredible thrill, and that's how a book was born... From the book to the podcast, it was a lightning-fast decision so that even more people can contemplate and reevaluate their perspectives and paths, always debating because silence implies consent. Here, I want to first teach you to be conscious in your life, then to master your life, and finally, to create a Plan to live life to the fullest.
And let me tell you, it's going to be absolutely exhilarating!
Get ready to shatter those old beliefs, embrace your true potential, and design a life that will make you jump out of bed every morning with a gleam in your eye. It's time to seize the reins of your destiny and create a masterpiece out of every moment.
So, are you ready to dive headfirst into the adventure of a lifetime? Let's go!

I am a portuguese therapist with over 30 years experience and this podcast is written, planned, edited and produced by myself.
Learn more at: https://mportela.live

Hello there, welcome to the place where silence is not an option. Things are said here in a raw, perhaps harsh manner, but they are presented to you exactly as they are—no embellishments or doctrines of political correctness. After two podcasts that were so interventionist, we can easily trace the origin of the vast majority of corrosive, destructive, and reductionist thoughts.

And because, you know, life is just a walk in the park filled with rainbows and unicorns, right? But hey, who needs all that fluff when you can face reality head-on with a touch of sarcasm and a whole lot of enthusiasm? Let's dive into the depths of self-discovery and unravel the mysteries of our minds together. Welcome to the brutally honest and unapologetically real world of Mário Portela's podcast. Sit back, relax, and let's have a no-nonsense conversation that might just change your perspective—or at least make you chuckle along the way.

In the counseling setting, I often encounter patients who ask me (or question themselves) what they could do to distance themselves from negative and toxic thoughts that often lead them to impulsive and destructive actions. Taking the risk of sounding strange or peculiar, I often start by warning that, first and foremost, we need to understand whether the thoughts are genuinely ours or not.

Yes, you heard it right. Stick with me, and you'll grasp what I mean by this bizarre statement—those thoughts are not yours. In general, the notion that the thoughts inside our heads may not be our own is strange to many people, even frightening. In some minds, we're stepping into murky territory, delving into the realm of the eccentric.

From my experience, few of the genuinely negative thoughts are, in fact, ours. I assert this vehemently! Of course, being within our thought process, they appear to be ours. After all, if we're thinking them, why wouldn't they be ours, right? Wrong!

Do you really believe that these negative, destructive, demotivating thoughts are truly yours? Don't you deep down logically sense that they aren't yours, that you don't feel them as your own, and find yourself almost shaking your head, trying to remove them from your mind as quickly as possible? "How could I have thought this aberration?" you wonder, "I'm not like this, and I don't feel this way." So, if the thoughts don't resonate as ours, we really must consider: why do we have these thoughts, and where do they come from?

Our Brilliant Minds

Thoughts can be powerful, beautiful, and useful at times, but they can also be dangerous, destructive, and horrendous. It often feels like we're walking on a tightrope, consciously navigating the complexity of our thoughts, as if treading through a minefield. We proceed with great caution because we know that around any corner, there comes that familiar thought that provokes and diminishes us.

The mind is the most powerful tool we possess as inhabitants of this material dimension, using its power to inspire, intuit, and create. This is one of the wonderfully divine aspects of our mind when it works in our favor. However, the problem arises when the mind becomes critical and analytical, directing attention to fear, which, in a way, saves us by identifying real imminent dangers but also provokes illusory and traumatizing fears.

Distinguishing useful fear from useless fear can become complex and challenging, especially because a fear-inducing thought that isn't ours can have a detrimental effect on our body that previously did not suffer from such a problem. In these moments, we must truly tune into ourselves and seek our inner light to understand what lies in the midst of the darkness of thought.

Deeply tuning in with ourselves will provide guidance to access the situation realistically, helping us understand whether these thoughts are truly ours. The famous best-selling author Michael Alan Singer rightly said, "NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF YOUR THOUGHTS ARE USELESS. THEY DO LITTLE MORE THAN SCARE YOU!" So, let's navigate the labyrinth of our minds, filter out the unnecessary noise, and find the brilliance within.

So, whose thoughts are these?

Before we delve into a more metaphysical and even quantum direction, let's answer this question by recalling the podcast on the awakening of the herd. Why do we act in accordance with a group even if we don't agree 100% with everything or even if we don't know all the details?

The answer is simple: our beliefs, values, ideas, and even decisions are not necessarily ours because they are largely inherited from the concepts that various groups we inhabit have transmitted to us, and we simply parrot them, breathe life into them. Whether through education, culture, religion, ideology, family or regional group... we absorb all the details and assimilate them as our own.

Now... what are most negative thoughts based on? Collective thinking, various beliefs, general values, and integrated culture.

We spend time and effort combating negative thoughts. We are bombarded by thousands of negative and toxic thoughts every passing day. When I say 'negative,' I mean all thoughts that are not productive, that do not create, support, or uplift. They are destructive thoughts, in one way or another, whether about ourselves or others. These thoughts can be so powerful that they can lead us to take actions as negative as they are.

The effort we make to combat them, trying to create a positive framework for them to fit into or attempting to completely remove them from our minds, is sometimes a draining effort both mentally and energetically. If we can't stop the overwhelming train of thoughts that drain us, they can push us to the point of throwing us into the abyss, sometimes so intensely that we become vulnerable to fear and self-hatred.

So, if these thoughts don't serve us and instead run us over in the direction of negative experiences and marks, why are we bombarded by them? Why on earth aren't we bombarded by positive thoughts instead?

What's going on here? Why is there so much consistency in negativity within our minds instead of an abundance of inspiring and encouraging thoughts?

The visionary Terrence McKenna once stated: "Every time we think we are thinking, we are actually listening."

Have you ever noticed that when we're sitting with nothing to do, not really focused on anything in particular, or even trying not to think, thoughts continue to surface constantly in the mind? One negative thought may well be followed by another, and before we know it, we have a negative torrent out of control. Sometimes things that border on psychosis reign in our minds, and we can't avoid their arrival, always left with a bitter taste in our mouths when pondering why such a hellish thought is in our heads.

This happens not because something has happened or because someone needs us, but rather because words play in our minds as if we were hearing interference from a stream of consciousness that is not our own. Thoughts create a reality in our heads that is not precisely OUR reality.

I know that all of this may seem like madness at first glance, but nowadays, there are many studies pointing to scientific theories in this field. It's as if there's a collective consciousness that interconnects us all... it sounds like something out of a movie, but are we not all connected to each other, are we not part of the same biological family?

If all cats instinctively know how to groom their fur and carry out certain actions without apparent teaching, why would the human race be disconnected from each other?

The World of Thoughts

Around us and everywhere, there is a myriad of energetic flows in a vast electromagnetic spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all existing electromagnetic wave frequencies, and without delving into complicated scientific terms, we can call it multidimensional. Today, science shows in various ways that thoughts create and emit their own frequencies, coexisting as if they were radio waves that we emit and receive.

It's as if all your thoughts are automatically and frantically projected into a kind of 'World of Thoughts,' where all thoughts meet and are pure energy in themselves. Like us, all material biological entities (humans, animals, and plants), elementals, or dimensionals go through the same process of creating flow through thought. This world of thoughts is a kind of matrix of polarity/duality where energy creates everything that inevitably manifests in one way or another. We cooperate with this matrix because we are not just beings of flesh. Some believe it to be the soul or spirit; others label it as Higher Self, spiritual guide, etc. These streams of thinking energy are freely and constantly accessible through the mind, and we don't have the ability to select what we obtain from this dual matrix. Some, more than others, can only filter what is useful to them.

In reality, it is this freely accessible and heavy pessimism that keeps us in the game we chose to play: Life! Two of Buddha's Four Noble Truths have inspired thinkers and philosophers over time, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, illustrating why this negativity keeps us. Firstly, suffering – life is invariably subject to all kinds of suffering. Secondly, the cause of suffering, which is nothing more than ignorance leading us to desire what causes us pain: attachments, self-criticism, self-judgment, greed, possessions, etc.

These philosophers argued that negativity, fear, guilt, shame, and jealousy create the necessary trauma and drama for a suffering that allows us to experience this material dimension intensely. Some beliefs and theologies advocate that we are responsible for our thoughts and therefore should believe in them and deal with them. However, believing that ALL those scattered, wrong, destructive, and perverse thoughts are our own and being forced to feel responsible for them will exponentially increase suffering by creating feelings of guilt and self-sabotage.
And if the topic was complex until now, I can further perplex you by reminding you that many of the thoughts we 'hear' in our minds are, in fact, partly ours and probably from other times, other existences, other lives... because only the material world of this dimension is governed by the laws of time and space.

So, if you're listening to me now and somehow feel guilt, sadness, and shame for some of your thoughts... please, stop doing that to yourself! Learn to meditate, learn to access YOUR thoughts, and organize YOUR mind.

I want you to know that you're not crazy or dealing with psychotic problems... you're alive! Stop punishing yourself... and live, because Buddha would tell you that to live is to suffer; we just have to learn to suffer with 'quality' and learn from it.

How to Sort Through Thoughts!

Yes, we have almost uncontrollable access to a plethora of random thoughts, mostly negative. That's precisely why I can offer you some guidance on how to sort through your world of thoughts.

Start by optimizing the flow of thoughts through meditation. Use the techniques you already know or learn to meditate in my entirely online course, 100% supported and reliable. For now, try visualizing yourself in front of a river with many fish, and each fish is a thought; slowly stop the fast and chaotic movement of the river and practice detaching from so many fish by selecting and identifying which ones are yours.

Then realize that most of the time, thoughts dominate you because you emotionalize them. Don't emotionalize thoughts prematurely. Imagining the fish I mentioned, if you give them emotion without considering it, it's like taking the bait and losing control. Be first an observer of the fish, listen to your thoughts, and when you identify yours, then take them and emotionalize them at will... to know if they are yours, they have to make COMPLETE sense, not just some sense.

Another important guideline is to let your mind and body wander. Don't let yourself stagnate or succumb to procrastination... go for a walk, see people, feel the world from your perspective. Take the opportunity to listen to music because music is one of the best tools to control the flow and content of thoughts... but be careful and thoughtful in choosing the themes and the subliminal weight of the music you choose for yourself.

In summary, enter creative mode, do more, and develop a little every day. Look for an activity that allows you to create something from nothing.

Gradually, you'll be able to neutralize thoughts that make you feel bad without wasting time accepting or creating a positive framework for them. Remember that what doesn't make you feel good is not necessary... and that applies to your thoughts as well.

There is so, so much happening within us, above us, and around us that most people spend their entire lives in an unconscious and detached mode... it's incredible how they can even walk and breathe at the same time. Give yourself a pat on the back for feeling that you breathe and for feeling beyond because what made you hear this confusing podcast is very real... the power of your thoughts!

It's time to turn the game around, knowing the rules. Becoming conscious at every step. Whenever you hear thoughts that aren't yours, smile at them and send them back with a more positive twist. Remember that living consciously is not living without suffering; it's knowing how to live that suffering with quality.

If you've listened this far, it's because, in some way, the podcast has been another light on your path to restoration. Otherwise, you'd be there lost in absurd thoughts that aren't even yours. And it's for being here that I offer you my most sincere and profound gratitude, sprinkled with a smile.