You created your disease, and so did everyone else, and on some level you actually love it. I know how that sounds. Stick with me, because this is a crazy idea you've probably never heard before. It's built on personal responsibility, and on the understanding that you are the creator of your entire reality. For me, seeing it this way has unlocked a lot of power and a lot of ideas, and I think you're going to love where it goes.
Let's look at the opposite first, because the opposite of saying you created your disease and you love it is saying you didn't create your disease and you hate it. That seems to be what's normal in our society, and to me it sounds a lot like a victim mindset: I didn't do this, I hate it, I didn't do anything to deserve it. I'd rather take the responsibility, because responsibility is where the power is.
The year I manifested my own crisis
Let me give you an example from my own life. In 2020 and 2021, like a lot of people, I was upset with the state of the world. I was very annoyed with everything that was going on. I was in the best health I'd ever been in, and I thought everybody else was being insane and that nothing was being presented honestly.
The one idea that helped me stop being upset was remembering: I am God, and this is my universe. So why did I create this? When I sat with that, I realized I had manifested it. Back in 2019, I was in the worst financial position of my life, and I was manifesting really hard. There were two things I wanted more than anything. One, I wanted to get out of the financial situation I was in, so I wanted some really low-interest-rate loans, which at the time seemed about impossible. The idea that I could get a 3% loan on $100,000 with my crappy credit seemed absurd. And two, I really wanted to be successful as a content creator online.
Think about those manifestation goals at the end of 2019. There seemed to be no possible way that anything would come along to address them. And then 2020 came along. As someone who had been live streaming since 2013, back when most people were just trying it for the first time, I had seven years of experience and millions of followers. Then the government gave me disaster loans at 3% on $120,000, with my crappy credit. And in 2021, I made over a hundred thousand dollars of profit in a single year playing video games on Facebook, after blowing up my business and watching everything go downhill in 2019, struggling, and then finding my way again in 2020.
In 2021, after being absolutely miserable and making videos complaining about the state of the world, I realized I had literally manifested all of this. This was exactly what I asked for. I just hadn't been specific. I said, get me out of this financial situation, I want low interest rate loans, I want to be able to just stream and be a full-time content creator. And life said, here you go, this is what you wanted. And I said, no, wait. I guess this is what I wanted. I'd better be more specific next time. That one shift, just changing my interpretation of the world, brought me right back to being completely happy.
My dad's disease, and the exit he chose
Let me give you this in a few other forms. My dad passed away ten years ago. At the time he had some kind of bone disease, something like leukemia, along with heart disease and other problems. I was miserable over it. If you had told me back then that my dad created his own disease and loved it, I'd probably have punched you in the face.
But ten years later, a depth of understanding has come to me. Once you start to look at reincarnation and immortality the way I do, you see that yes, this body may pass, but the body dying is kind of like falling asleep. You go to sleep, you go off on some other adventures, and whenever you're ready you can wake up in a nice new baby body and start the whole experience over again.
When I look at my dad's life, he didn't seem happy in his marriage to my mother from around the year 2000 on. By 2014 he was stuck in a rut, and he didn't see any honorable exit. If he left, he couldn't leave my mom without everyone in his life being disgusted with him, from her to my brother and me to the rest of his family. He'd been married more than thirty years. I think he wanted out. But he was born in 1950. What was he going to do at 64 years old, leaving his wife? He could have done a lot of things. But I don't think he saw a way out, except getting sick and dying.
I realized this the other day, and it hit me hard: I think my dad, on the deepest level, intentionally got sick and died because he wanted out. He wanted to make an honorable exit. On the surface he never would have said that. But deep down, his spirit was bored and apathetic about his life. All he did was sit on the couch, watch the news and TV, smoke cigarettes, and go to the doctor. Who would want to keep living in that scenario? The way I see it, his disease was self-manifested to give him a chance to move on to something new, and to make an exit where everyone would say, what a shame, he was such a good father and husband. If he had simply left my mother, everyone would have called him a jerk. In many ways it was easier for him to die, let go of everything from this life, and start over fresh in a new body, or go off and do anything else his soul wanted to do.
People who seem to choose when they go
When you look at it that way, you start to notice how many people very intentionally seem to pass away. There was a lady in her 80s at the AA meeting I used to go to. Outwardly she appeared healthy, and nothing seemed wrong. But one day at a meeting she said that her husband and her son, who had both passed away, were building her a house in heaven that would soon be ready for her. At the time I didn't think much of it. She died a few days later, and we all realized she knew exactly what she was doing. She went intentionally. She decided it was time to move on.
To me it seems clear that you're either in the middle of this life loving it, growing and expanding, with nowhere you'd rather be, which is exactly where I am right now, or you've lost that. There's nowhere I'd rather be. There's no other body I'd like to inhabit. I'm not interested in being a baby again, because I love being a grownup. I love my life. I'm thriving, I'm growing, I have a passion and a joy for living. But if you lose that passion and joy, getting sick and dying could actually be the best path to a new body, an honorable exit, and a new adventure.
My sponsor in AA, who I'd been with since 2015, I believe recently passed. I don't have proof, but the last time we talked he said he was at the doctor and wasn't doing well. He'd talked a lot about dying over the last few years, and I told him, don't be scared, Bob. It's a whole new adventure. You can get another body and go do whatever you want. If you're not happy in this reality, you don't have to suffer before you move on. It's okay to go whenever you want to.
The woman who was terrified of one disease
There's a book called Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani. It's her story, so I'll stay general and let you read the details from her, but here's the overview. She spent her whole life terrified of getting one specific disease. She did everything she could think of to avoid it, but the entire time she obsessed over it, feared it, and thought about it constantly. And she got it. All the things she did to prevent it didn't work, because, as she put it, she was thinking about it and afraid of it all the time, and then she got it.
When she went into the hospital, very nearly dead from the disease, she had a near-death experience. She could see that she had manifested the disease through her choice to focus on it and fear it, and she saw that her situation could even be a great opportunity to help free others who were struggling the same way. She made a full recovery that the doctors had never seen anyone make. Her story got shared by Wayne Dyer and inspired countless people. She chose to come back rather than go down with the disease, so she could show people there's another way.
So much of what happens in your life, you are self-creating. Even when you lean on a doctor, or a healer, you're giving away a power that is actually yours. There are real opportunities to work together, but the power is still yours. There's another book I love on this, Mind Over Medicine by Dr. Lissa Rankin, and I've shared my full thoughts on whether you can heal yourself if you want to go deeper on the science side of this.
I'll reference one more. There's a doctor named Gladys who lived into her hundreds and wrote a book. She got one fatal disease and treated it two completely different ways. The first time, she treated it with a holistic solution that most doctors don't even know about and that existing science calls unproven. You're not really allowed to be specific about it, which is why I'm not, but she actually treated her disease successfully with that exact solution.
Diseases have many ways to be treated
The second time the same disease showed up, she chose to treat it with regular Western medicine, because she thought it would be a different experience from the first time. So diseases have a lot of ways to be treated.
For me, the biggest disease that's manifested in my life is alcoholism, and that was obviously self-created. Some people will die as alcoholics and never stop drinking. They'll go to their grave that way. Many people look at it and say, well, it's just a disease, I got it genetically, and there's nothing I can do about it. I don't see it that way. Yes, I may have different genetics than most people when it comes to alcohol. When I take one drink, it sets off a physical craving that perhaps 90% of people never experience. But what kind of person, finding out that a single drink starts a ruthless physical obsession, would keep drinking anyway, except someone who on some level wants to be an alcoholic?
There's so much research showing that our genetic foundation is generally secondary. It's our epigenetics, the way our genes express themselves based on our lifestyle, that's primary. You have the potential to be a small body or a big body, to be lean or to carry a lot of muscle, to be high energy and joyful or low energy and miserable. Your basic genetic code is more like a realm of possibilities. Almost all of us are genetically capable of manifesting almost any of the basic diseases we go through. The real question is why some people manifest them and so many others don't. Why do some people seem to do everything to live healthy and still die young, while others have a real joy for living, barely pay attention to preventing anything, and live into their 90s?
The only common factor that makes sense to me is that you are the one who creates everything in your life. You create the ease, the comfort, the love, and the joy. And you create the dis-ease, the downsides, the problems, and the disasters. What I've noticed is that people who reach the highest ages keep a passion for life, a will to live, a flexibility, a willingness to change, and strong relationships with other people.
Isolation, and why my dad's death freed me
By the end of his life, my dad was very isolated. Almost the only person he spent time with was my mother, and almost everything he really lived for was gone. I was married and living with my wife and didn't really need my dad anymore. My brother was off living his own life. My mom certainly needed him and was devastated by his death. But honestly, my dad's death was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it freed me to have other father figures and to see more possibilities in my life.
I wouldn't be surprised if my father had the idea that dying was the best thing he could do for everyone, and that the way to do it was to get sick and go through the routine at the doctor so that everyone would feel it was inevitable, that it just had to happen. His death gave me the experience of awakening and wanting to be different. Often, especially as kids, we think love means wanting to be exactly like someone else. When my dad died, it unlocked all this desire in me to be different from him.
Now I look at my father-in-law. My own father quit drinking and quit drugs, and it's amazing he even lived into his 60s, given how hard he struggled with addiction in his 30s and 40s. By 40 he'd given up all his addictions except smoking, and he chose to keep smoking. He chose to ignore his doctor's advice. The doctor said, Mr. Banfield, you need to get out and walk and exercise and be active, and my father chose to ignore that and keep smoking. To me, those were his decisions, and on some level I think he was at peace with how much longer he'd live. I feel similarly about myself. I don't care that much about an extended life. I'm fine if I die in my 60s.
Meanwhile, my father-in-law is in his 70s and just switched to a whole plant-based diet. If you read the book How Not to Die, written by a medical doctor, there's a huge amount of evidence and research that has convinced me, beyond a reasonable doubt for my own life, that eating a whole-food plant-based diet can help prevent, halt the progression of, and even reverse the top 15 causes of death. So why don't you hear that research all the time? My belief is that it's cheap and quick to give you, and there's far more money in selling you disease, making you a victim, and keeping you sick and easier to control. Healthy people are harder to control and manipulate. Sick people, unfortunately, are much easier.
The healthiest I've ever been
I'm the healthiest I've ever been in this entire life. I haven't had a single sick day since 2022, which is more than a year and a half ago now, and I can tell you exactly why I got sick that last time. It was because I didn't want to help my mother move. I've shared the longer version of how I haven't been sick since October 2022 separately, but this is the heart of it.
This is what's tricky about saying you love your disease and you created it. Your disease is often trying to fulfill some unacknowledged desire. On the surface, under no circumstances would my dad have said he wanted to die, unless you could get deep, deep down and ask: are you really fulfilled? Is your life full of joy? If you could have anything, would you choose to sit at home in your 60s on the couch watching the news? Is this your idea of the best life you could be living in any reality?
What I've noticed is that our diseases are sometimes the deep desires we consciously suppress. They come up to give us something we want but won't consciously acknowledge. My dad's diseases, I think, came up because he wanted more action. His life had been action-packed: he went to Vietnam, he had all those addictions, and it stayed intense until he settled down and raised us. He was fine with that for a while, but after my brother and I left, he never really picked his passion back up. I imagine he wanted more action, more learning, more growth, and couldn't consciously dig his way to it.
The last time I got sick
The last time I got sick, I was due to fly to Mississippi and spend a week or more helping my mother move. Consciously, I would have told you I wanted to help my mother move. Deep down, though, there was a big part of me, maybe 49%, that really did not want to go. There was a deep part of me that did not want to stop live streaming, playing Gods Unchained, making love to my wife every other night, seeing my kids, and going to all my yoga people and my AA meetings. But there was a conscious 51% that said, we're doing this, I'm not listening to any objections. So the 49% got very vocal.
Often your mind thinks about it backwards. The night before, I remember thinking, I can't get sick, I'm supposed to go help my mother move, I don't want to do this. I felt betrayed by my body. Why are you doing this to me, body? Notice the words: not "I want to go help my mother move," but "I planned on it." I was dreading having to call my mother and tell her I couldn't come. And often the very thing you're afraid of is something a part of you actually wants to happen.
I was also paranoid about uploading a video, even though it wasn't in the least bit violating any policies. And I realized part of me would love it if I couldn't upload videos anymore, because then, and only then, would I be free to do something else. As long as I can upload videos, I don't see anything better to do professionally. But part of me would honestly love to just get banned, sell all my office stuff, and be free to go do whatever else I want with my life. When you dig into that, you start to see that parts of you will manifest things because, on some level, you want the experience.
Once I got sick, on the last day, in October 2022, I literally had no symptoms except fatigue. No sniffles, no cough, just fatigue. My whole body felt drained of energy, and I could hardly get out of bed. What's nice is that the more personal responsibility you take, and the more you love your body and take care of it, the more your body gives you exact, specific symptoms. I just had fatigue, and I couldn't get out of bed, until I called my mother and told her I couldn't make it. Then I managed to get up and play Gods Unchained right afterward. Interesting how I had energy for what I wanted to do, but none for what I didn't want to do.
What happened when I honored the real reason
Then I started consciously setting the intention: I really do want to go help my mother move. I'm okay if it's uncomfortable, I'll deal with it. I started to think of it as an adventure, the biggest and most challenging thing I'd done in a while, and I told myself I wanted that challenge.
My body revved the energy back up over the next couple of days. I'm not saying that in most cases a disease you've manifested will instantly go away. But once you get clear and honor the reason it's there, you may find it goes away rapidly. Just a few days later, I moved 15,000 pounds of stuff, mostly by myself, into a truck and out to the landfill and the thrift shop. It was amazing how much energy my body had for that, because deep down I genuinely wanted to do it.
Peaches, and a dog who came back
It gets even better, so I'll wrap up with one last story. A few years ago we had a dog we absolutely loved. She was found in a peach orchard, so we called her Peaches. She'd lived out in the wild, had to kill for food and defend herself against wild animals, so she wasn't a purely domesticated dog.
One day our daughter put her arm around the dog's neck and sort of rode her, and Peaches bit my daughter in the face. It wasn't catastrophic, but it certainly seemed bad at the time. My daughter had a spot on her face from a tooth mark and a gash on the side of her head, and we took her to the hospital to get it sewn up. Now, right before that, the dog had had some kind of disease the vet said was fatal, telling us to just go home and help her die. Instead, the dog decided to live and cured the disease entirely on her own. We gave her extra love and attention, but no medical treatment, and whatever the vet said was fatal, she cured herself. I've told the full story of how my dog healed herself of a terminal disease if you want the details.
After she bit my daughter, we kept both dogs separated from the children at all times so a bite could never happen again. But the dog wasn't living her best life that way, and she died about a year and a half later. What kind of life was she living at that point? And now there's a dog on my bed right now that looks almost exactly like the dog we used to have. She was adopted by my wife's parents. To me, it looks like the dog intentionally got sick, died, reincarnated, and came right back to our family in a fresh new body.
Things make so much sense sometimes if you can see beyond one lifetime and take absolute personal responsibility. If somebody gets sick and dies, on some level you can respect it, because on some level they must have wanted to. There was something else they'd rather do. That's what I hope to communicate: a bigger vision of life and possibility, one that helps you enjoy life, find your passion, and stop suffering in areas where, to me, the suffering is optional.
I appreciate you taking this idea in. These are the kinds of conversations I keep going in my Life playlist, where I share more about reincarnation, recovery, health, and taking radical responsibility for everything in your reality.