You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode is titled, “Why Taking Sides is a Huge Source of Inner Conflict.” Many of us think that conflict is in the world, but your conflict doesn’t persist because there’s a lack of truth in the universe or a lack of peace, or there’s not even a lack of desire for harmony in your life or the universe. And people aren’t inherently bad for the most part. But we see conflict everywhere in the external world. Conflict exists because people don’t know themselves as source. And when we recognize and know ourselves as life source and not 3D ego, all conflict and all the sides that we all take automatically disappear. So if you’d like to remove conflict from your life and bring more harmony and peace into your life starting with this episode, keep listening.
Hi, I’m Jim Fortin and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah-rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology, and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.

Okay, so in this episode, we’re talking about conflict. We’re talking about all the disharmony. You know, I’m going to go a couple of different places here because many of you guys think that harmony and disharmony are about the world outside of you. Or it might be out of doors of your home. Or the conflict is in my home, but not in the world. And what we want to look at is all the things because, see, these are the source of us understanding conflict. When we start reacting or thinking from or observing anger, fear, judgment, and for big people and especially parents, the desire to fix a situation, we lose the quietness and peacefulness and solitude of mind that is the peace that we desire.
Many of us, what we do, and I cannot judge here… I’ve done it for many years. I don’t do it all that much anymore. I’m sure that I do, and I’m sure that I’m not even aware of it. But many times we get into the deception of righteousness. Now, I used to defend my righteousness by thinking, “I want the world to be a much better place. I want everyone to get along. And what’s wrong with these people who are always trying to hurt people? Or what’s wrong with these people that are causing all this conflict or all this hate or all this anger in the world?” And then what I did, which is what many of us do: we take sides. But what we don’t look at is when we’re taking sides, we’re also taking on a bit of hatred. And we don’t think about it that way. And many of us, when we’re taking sides… look at the world today. When we are taking sides, what comes with that for most people is we are taking on a lot of anger. Now, on the flip side of this entire concept that I’m trying to explain, many times, which was mine more than most, we would disguise taking sides as compassion. Even today, I’m still big on justice, equality, nondescript morality, and I don’t mean religious morality, but treating people well. And then many of us want to be morally correct. And we don’t recognize we’re taking sides when we do that.
Yesterday, my car broke down and I just moved to a small Colorado town. I don’t know any mechanics in town. I just Googled on my phone looking for a tow truck. Guys, I have never needed a tow truck. So I just saw a couple of ads and one had something like, “we’ll be there in 15 to 30 minutes or it’s free.” And it was already late in the day, and I’m like, “okay, I’ll just click that one.” Well, come to find out, it was a Chinese company that literally placed an ad here where I live, and I’m sure in many other places. And when I called them, it didn’t feel right. There was something off. It’s a small town. And I told them where I was, and they couldn’t find it on the map. And my thought was, “well, if you’re a local company,” and I asked them, and they said yes, “if you’re a local company, then how come you don’t know where this particular supermarket is?” They didn’t know, and now it’s a red flag. Anyway, they said they were sending a truck my way. After charging me $525, I didn’t know that you pay after, not before. Come to find out, my intuition kicked in, and I’m like, “I’m going to Google this phone number.” Scam. Big time. So now I have to call Amex and reverse the charge.
But a lot of times we go into hate and anger and resentment and all these kind of things. We become very righteous. “I’m a good person. They’re a bad person.” We don’t recognize that’s all from the position of our human ego. Every bit of that is from human morality and human ego. And I think back growing up in a small Texas town, the amount of fundamental Christian, and even living in Texas for many years, and the amount of megachurches, the amount of egotistical, arrogance, anger-driven morality… meaning a Baptist preacher would preach all day long about Jesus and morality and being morally correct and all this kind of crap, not even recognizing that they’re just preaching one little model of reality, and then they’re trying to impose their little bitty model of reality on all other beings in consciousness on the planet. Because if you were to ask the Dalai Lama… and that’s all egotistical, by the way… if you were to ask, let’s say, the Dalai Lama or a Buddhist monk, they may give you, and they probably would, a completely different answer about the righteous morality or the indignation or the anger or whatever it is.
So your turning point is this. Your realization is this: the second that we declare and we decide one side is right and the other side is wrong, in that moment, we have moved into the 3D ego, the 3D identification, the 3D body, the container of skin, the human identity, and we have left divine consciousness, at least the awareness of divine consciousness. And this right here is what divides humanity, is when we live from the righteous, many times indignation, of the righteousness and the morality of a particular human identity. And, you know, talking about the small Texas town, preachers divide. I don’t care what anyone says. Look around. Watch any late-night TV, just a regular channel. I don’t have it, but I can find it online, I’m sure. Regular channels preaching their morality on marriage and who can get married and what happens if you do this and you can’t get married or adultery or whatever it is. Preachers divide. Politicians divide. Money classes divide. Countries divide. Religions divide. All for what?
Think about this. And this whole podcast is about transforming your life from the inside out. And in the vein that I’m doing it, it’s to help you find a better experience of life, better quality of life. Money, politicians, preachers, countries, religions, why do they divide? It’s all a disguise of consciousness wrapped in dogma relative to the identity of the person spreading the dogma. What we have to recognize is all of us, we all have consciousness running through us. But like Gandhi said, there is no religion in heaven. We all have and are consciousness, but then we put the consciousness in the container of the body, and then we wrap it in a flag, or in a religion, or in a thought, or in a hate, or in a war against other people.
A great metaphor that I was thinking about earlier, the place that we have to go to, you’re listening right now, where we have to go is above all this. And let me give you a metaphor that pops into my mind. Look at Coke and look at Pepsi. You will look at Coca-Cola saying, “we are better than Pepsi, we taste better.” And you’ll look at Pepsi saying, “we are better than Coca-Cola, we taste better.” But the truth is, ask someone who doesn’t drink any soda. But the truth is, they are both soda and they are both equal, even though they appear differently. And then you can ask someone like me who doesn’t drink soda, and I’ll say candidly, personally, I think they’re both shit. I think they’re both garbage. And I don’t think human beings are garbage. But that’s demonstrating the metaphor is that neither one of them are right. Neither one of them are better. They are just soda. And the same thing about human beings. We have to recognize that we are all source consciousness, first and foremost. We need to understand that we are consciousness that lives in these containers and that we are judging not from divine mind or God or spirit or life source. We’re not judging from there, which is all pure love. We are judging from the container.
We take sides all day long. And again, this podcast is about finding peace. The way to find peace is to stop taking sides. So what does it look like to take a side? Because the thing about taking a side, a side has no spiritual reality or truth. Think about that. A side has no spiritual reality or truth. Taking a side is basically a behavior, a product of the human intellect. And the human intellect is trying to interpret the world, telling everyone else, “this is what my interpretation tells the world that it is.” But by the way, and by the way, I’m only going to tell you what the world is as I’m interpreting from my little bitty experience of my container of my experience on this planet. And you’re wrong, and I’m right. And then we take sides. And the thing about the human body and our understanding of human reality, we can definitely perceive sides and we can definitely perceive a divide. But the mind, the soul, and consciousness, it cannot perceive anything other than unity.
For human beings, our default setting is divide, us against them. But at the level of Gandhi, there is no religion in heaven. I mean, speaking of divide, let’s use the metaphor of heaven as people understand it. You do not go to… if you go there, and I’m using this again as an example, you do not go to, air quote, heaven. By the way, poor people who come to heaven go to that part of heaven. They go to the south side of heaven. Rich people go to that part of heaven. Muslims go to that part of heaven. The Christians go to that part of heaven. The good Christians go to the better part of heaven. And the bad Christians, even though they kind of barely made it in by the skin of their teeth, they go to a different part of heaven. Now, if you’re in this metaphor that I’m using of heaven, you are in heaven, period. We are consciousness, period. But it’s taking the sides and the divide that creates all of our conflict for us. Because in our mind, “oh my God, I took this side, I’m righteous, and they are on that side, and they are wrong, and they are not righteous. And guess what? There are bad people over there.” And I’m going to use all of my mental power, my mind, and my awareness, and I’m going to hate on them over there. I’m going to lose all my peace of mind because of my righteous indignation. It’s all human ego.
I remember one time reading this quote by Mother Teresa, and she said… and this was a very impactful quote for me… she said, “whatever you fight weakens you.” Think about that. Whatever you fight weakens you. The realization that came to me is you cannot be for something without automatically being against something else. Think about that. The moment you oppose something, you grant it power, you acknowledge it as real, and you actively feed the illusion of, “oh, okay, I literally am for this. I am for abortion. I am against abortion. I am for smoking. I’m against smoking. I am for gay marriage. I am against gay marriage. I am for rich people. I am against poor people.” And the list goes on into infinity from human beings. And the second you walk into that trap, you automatically are fighting something. It’s like you’re covered in a blanket, but you can’t get out from underneath it. You’re fighting and you’re swinging away at the blanket, but you can’t get out.
We have the best example in the world right now. Look at this nonsensical movement called MAGA, Make America Great Again, and the sheer, excuse me, fucking stupidity that comes out of that movement or opposite movements that fight that movement. It’s sheer freaking human stupidity and a lack of awareness because people who get into these illusions, they feed the illusions and then they fight the other side. They tear down the other side. They burn down the homes of the other side. They condemn, they imprison, they chase, they chastise, they dox, they do all these things to the other side. And what comes to mind is, I remember many years ago, Wayne Dyer, and I’ve said it in the podcast before, Wayne Dyer said, “a tree does not set fire to the branches on the other side of the tree.” Think about that. A tree does not set fire to the branches on the other side of the tree. But if we think it’s a different tree, we think it’s okay to set fire on that tree because, “I’m a better and more righteous and I’m just a smarter tree over here and I’m going to burn that tree down,” when it’s all part of the same tree.
Okay, this episode is about you. Look at how this plays out in your own life. If you’re hating… and by the way, I do not endorse any kind of human bondage, any kind of anybody negating anybody, any kind of one religion being better than the other. They’re all just religion like Coke and Pepsi. My righteous indignation used to come from what I thought was neutrality, wanting better for everyone else on the planet. I always subscribed, and I heard this in college, Thomas Paine said that he was a member of no political party, he was a citizen of the world. And many years ago, my righteousness used to be, “I’m a citizen of the world. What the hell’s wrong with you people that are trying to tear down other people?” That stole my peace of mind. So look at how this plays out in your own life. Look how much us against them that you play out in your own life. And then look how much benefit you confer on yourself for being one of us against them. And then what we do in our mind, we watch news and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.
You know, this past year, we moved off from Facebook with my business, with my company, my programs. We moved off Facebook over to an app. And I didn’t look at any Facebook. Mainly for me, it’s a very toxic space. Now, I really haven’t looked into Facebook in about a year. And a couple of days ago, I got on Facebook and just started looking at it. And the amount of polarity in that space and the amount of anti-Trump posts on Facebook… I think many years ago, I would have been one of those people with my righteous justification and my morality of wanting a better world. It’s not just the MAGA world. It’s all of our world would have been my argument many years ago. This day and age, I’m like, why waste my energy? Why waste my energy? That’s like me sitting there moderating which is better, Coke or Pepsi? And then thinking this is the end-all be-all, and I’m sitting here drinking Coke, slapping somebody, saying, “you shouldn’t be drinking Pepsi, you idiot. Pepsi’s bad for you.” All the while, I’m drinking the Coke.
Now, I heard this phrase many years ago, is a concept called mastering neutrality. And it fit for me when I heard it. What mastering neutrality is, is that life source, consciousness, it doesn’t recognize the difference between two opinions. It stands completely above them, which is why I threw in the Coke and the Pepsi example. Because you can sit here and you can be not neutral and you can fight for Coke or you can fight for Pepsi. I do not go there. Where I go to is, let me stand above them, look at Coke and Pepsi, and just call it like it is: they are both sodas. So that’s where we need to work from, is the awareness and the observation and looking at all of this nonsense that people get into. So our way to do that is to start withdrawing the fuel, withdrawing the attention. Because you have to recognize this. I think everyone listening to this podcast, we want the world to be a better place. We do not heal the world by making the correct side win. Think about that. We do not heal the world by making the correct side win.
You look at everything coming out of Washington DC right now, it’s all about the correct side. It’s not about… only for the sake of example… it’s not about, okay, we are all Americans on this part of the continent, let’s unify and work together. No, we have the correct side and the righteous side and the wrong side and the libtards on one side and the crazy MAGA, just all kind of words and language on both sides. We have all these words and definitions. We’re all human. We’re all on the planet sharing the same oxygen. Now, that’s a more macro example that I’m giving you. But look at your own life. Because we don’t find right now in your own life, you think about, okay, am I at peace today? Have I been at peace every single day for the last month? You’re probably going to say, no, I’ve not. But then ask yourself, if I have not been at peace, or at the times I have not been at peace, what side am I fighting for? Because make no mistake, you are fighting for a side, and that’s the illusion right there. So that’s not where we find the peace. We find the peace by living in the awareness that we are all, pick your own word, divine mind, soul, quantum field, force, God, whatever. Let’s use the word God for a moment. God has no side. Like the Gandhi example that I gave you, there is no religion in heaven. Source, God, divine mind, has no nationality. None. No borders. No fences.
So the question, apply that to your own life: if I am a reflection of divine mind, I am consciousness, and consciousness takes no sides, then what am I actually doing if I take a side? What we do is we exhaust ourself. I remember sitting on a channeling many, many years ago with Don Juan Matus. He wasn’t talking to me in the room. He was talking to someone else. And what he said to that person 25 years ago has always stuck with me. He said to this person, “you are not exhausting the world. You are exhausting yourself.” And that’s always been in my awareness.
Now, in full disclosure, of course, I’m not perfect. And there are things that I look out on the world and my righteousness will say, “that’s not right.” And I’ve realized that it’s not my place to tell other people what is right or wrong for them. Simply, it’s my place to look at me and live in me and a place that creates the most harmony in me. For me also, a place that creates the greatest support, the greatest bridge, the greatest guide that I can be for other people. And after that, I have to recognize my work is done. I leave it alone. I cannot pick a side. I cannot look and say, “well, people who don’t listen to this podcast, and they chase money, they’re lost.” I can’t do that. I don’t know their karma. I don’t know their dharma. And all that I can do is live in peace inside myself and for them.
Let’s talk for a moment about preference. This is something I see a lot of in parents, okay? Preference is many times we’re like… and I see a lot of parents that are kind of quiet about it, but they’re seething on the inside, meaning they’re giving up their peace, they’re giving up their harmony. Many times people will say, “my college son, my college daughter, or my child that’s 24, 25, 26, 27, they’re doing XYZ and I don’t like it. I don’t say anything, but I wish that… you know what? I wish they would do A, B, C, D, E, F, G differently.” It’s all human judgment is what that is. And it’s also extremely, and I mean this kindly, it’s extremely arrogant when people say, “I hope my son, I hope my daughter, I hope my partner changes.” Because guess what? If they change, they’re going to fit my model of reality. And guess what? I can be happy then, and I can be safe, and I can be content, and I can feel all warm and fuzzy inside myself as long as they fit my model of reality. When they fit my model of reality, then and only then will I be content. Well, that’s a preference. And what I look at is, what is their dharma? What is their karma? What is their path?
Now, in fairness to you listening, you may have kids. I do not have kids, but I know myself well enough that if I had kids and they said… and I would judge, but I’d say, “do whatever the hell you want to do with your life. Just don’t hurt other people.” But so many parents try to control what their kids do because they think they know best for their kid. I would be like, “I’m always here to support. I’m always here to love. Tell me how I can be of service. Tell me how I can assist you. And I support you on whatever path that you choose for yourself.” You know, when parents do that, many times they do it, I understand why they’re doing it, because they love. In their mind, and it’s an expression of, “if I worry about my son or daughter, they moved across the country. Oh my God, I’m not sure about that job they took. Are they going to be okay?” And we disguise that fear as concern. But really what we’re doing, and it’s pretty comical when we see it, what we’re really declaring is we’re telling the universe, “oh, they’re not wise enough or aware enough to make their own decisions. I don’t trust the universe and their karma and dharma to guide them. Let me and my omniscient wisdom and my judgment, let me control and approve what they are doing. Because if I control and approve what they’re doing, okay, guess what? Based upon my limited model of reality, they’re going to be okay.” And that’s not the way that it works.
So here’s where we have to work from. Many times when we have desires to do things in the world to change appearances, what we’re failing to realize is that this desire to change other people or change appearances is basically we’re trying to control something in the world. And we don’t see it like that. But we have to recognize the reality: when we’re trying to control something in the world, in that exact moment, simultaneously, we are giving up our peace. So recognize this. And here’s your takeaway (and I said I wouldn’t give you takeaways, but food for thought, okay?) peace is not the result of conflict being resolved in the world or the world of appearance, okay? I’ll say it again. Peace… because many of us think when I see the war in the Middle East, when I see Palestine free, something outside of myself, when I see that, okay, now I can be at peace. So peace is not the result of a family conflict or conflict in the world or the world of appearances. Peace is the realization that life force, soul, God, divine mind, has never been divided, never opposed itself, and has never taken a side. Think about that. Never taken a side.
Little after note here. One of my good friends who left the planet, Akio Matsumura, was good friends with a man who started the Human Kindness Foundation like 30 years ago. And this man wrote a very powerful letter to God. You can find it online, Letter to God by Human Kindness Foundation. It was written very colloquially and very easy for humans to understand. And basically, in this letter, it was God writing a letter. God said, “I am tired of you using me (something along the lines) I am tired of you using me to defend me. I am not this and I am not that. I am the whole enchilada.” Think about that. I am the whole enchilada.
But what we do is we fight saying it’s this and it’s that and it’s this. No, it’s not. Divine mind, soul doesn’t take sides. It is the whole enchilada of humanity. And we have to recognize that and be at peace with that and open our heart with that.
If you found value in this episode, if you would please share with other people. And if you find value in my episodes, please go to Apple, iTunes, and leave me a five-star review. Anything less than that will not help me, but I’d be very grateful for that. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you over on another episode. Bye-bye.