Dr. Wayne Dyer - Even Impossible things Will Manifest for You!

I have a right to be happy. I have a right to be unhappy. You'll hear people say it all the time. I have a right to be miserable. And they go around defending their right to be miserable. And when you defend your right to be miserable, you attract exactly what you're defending into your life.

The mystical techniques for achieving immortality, that is, the ability to manifest and attract into your life at any moment anything at all that you would desire, are revealed only to those who have dissolved all ties to the gross worldly realm of duality, conflict, and dogma. We are keeping ourselves from a destiny that we signed up for. Whatever you need will begin to show up. Wayne Dyer was an icon in self-development and spiritual growth. He wrote over 40 books with an astonishing 21 New York Times bestsellers. His childhood was spent in orphanages and foster homes, but he'd go on to inspire millions and become known as the father of motivation. In this exclusive speech from the Celebrate Your Life stage, Wayne Dyer shares with us the keys to manifest your dreams, let go of ego, and find your real purpose. Special thanks to Liz Dawn for partnering with us to release this exclusive content on our YouTube channel.

Enjoy.

So I want to share with you what has been happening in my life in the last year. It's been a magical year. It's been a transformative year, and I got involved in doing something that not only produced a book which I completed 2 days ago, but more than it being another book that I've written, it was something that allowed me to see the incredible power of passion and enthusiasm. And when you get it in your hearts, and my objective in this short time that I have here with you today is to convey that to you. What you need, what you're supposed to do, how it will work out, what financing is required, what people you'll need, what circumstances you will need to align with the stars or whatever, all will be taken care of if you stay with your passion. And I'd like to suggest to you that whatever your passion is, and even if you don't know what it is, whatever the feeling you have inside of you that says to you, this is what you're here for, you have to do this, as absurd as it may sound, As ridiculous as it may appear to everyone in your environment, including your husband and your children and your wife and your ex-wife and your grandchildren and your neighbors and the people you work with and the people you encounter everywhere you go, it may sound like the most absurd thing for someone of your age at this time, given these circumstances of your life, to be contemplating, even contemplating something so crazy, whatever it might be. And yet, if you can hold on to the passion, just hold on to that, hold on to the passion. What you're doing when you're holding on to the passion is you're holding on to God, because the word enthusiasm and passion are the same. And theos from the Greek is God, yasm means within. Enthusiasm is The God within you, the God within you. And this voice, if you read the 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace I put out for my children several years ago, I wrote it for my teenagers because I put down in there the 10 most significant and important ideas that I thought they should know long after I was gone. One of those ideas was the second one. It's called don't die with your music still in you, that you came here with music to play. So not dying with 'With your music still in you' is a very important idea. It's one of 10 that I carried with me for a long time and wrote it so that they would have it and be able to read that and know what I was speaking about. But beyond that is something that I have come to know, and that is when you have that passion and you hang on to it and you don't let any obstacle come in your way, you're hanging on to God. And another synonym for God is love. Right out of the New Testament. God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in me, and I in him. So now we're looking at enthusiasm being something, or passion being something that relates to your staying connected to a field of energy that is dominated by something called love, and that is God itself. And we all have this wonderful choice as we come into this world, and the choice is whether we're going to stay aligned with fat or not. The writing that I have been doing is from something called the Tao Te Ching. Now, the Tao Te Ching— T-A-O, it's pronounced D, but it's Tao— Tao Te Ching, the Great Way, was written— was dictated, I should say— 2,500 years ago. It's the longest surviving spiritual text on our planet. And the most sales of any other thing other than the Bible, the Tao Te Ching. And very few of us know very much about it, but you will. It's interesting because it was written and created at the very same time as the Bhagavad Gita, 2,500 years ago. Buddha, Lao Tzu were contemporaries. As was Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates. All of these beings were walking on the planet at the same time. It was a vortex, an intellectual spiritual vortex, not long after people were just crawling out of caves, only 500 years ago. Remember, we think of the Middle Ages, that was 12 or 1,300 years later. This was 500 years, 500 years. 5 centuries before the birth of Christ. This man who lived at God consciousness, at God realization, was dictating to a guard, they say, as he was leaving his village in ancient China, and he gave these verses, and there are 81 of them. 8-1. Infinite source, once. 81. Bhagavad Gita, being written at the same time, has 18 verses in it. One infinite source. And there are 18 holes on a golf course. I mean, how do you put that all together? There's got to be a connection there. There's got to be. So these 81 verses, um, I got this idea, and I, I never know where the next thing is going to come from. And it's, it's why I say to you with absolute certainty, when you have the passion, just the presence of the passion and nothing more, That's all you need. Just the presence of it is a guarantee for you that you have the capacity to manifest it, attract it, and create it in whatever form you would like it to show up. Just because you have the passion, because it's a knowing within you. And when you stay with it and align yourself with it, the book you have to write, the music you have to create, the artwork that you have to to do, the child that you absolutely must adopt, the business that you have to open up someplace out there that no one else understands or grasps, the thing that won't go away, the thing that won't go away. When you keep it there, when you stay aligned with it and you keep that alignment in harmony with God, with Spirit, whatever you need will begin to show up. The problem with most of us is that as it begins to show up, we then institute the thing that keeps us from formalizing and manifesting and creating the destiny that we signed up for. Things like doubts. Shakespeare said our doubts are our traitors. These are traitors. These are things that we live with and we hang on to and we spout and we talk about, and we don't realize that in just the most innocuous and innocent of ways, we are keeping ourselves from a destiny that we signed up for long before we ever entered into this world of form. So I was in England about a year and a half ago. I was lecturing over there, and a friend of mine in the United States, one of my best friends, told me about a book that he thought I should read. He said it's so well-written and it's so impactful. I think you should read it. And then I kept seeing, you know, this is what happens. We call these— Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity or synchrodestiny as Deepak calls it. And it's this idea that there's sort of a collaboration with fate that begins to take place when we stay connected to and attached to our passion. Not to how it'll happen, not to if it'll happen, not to when it will happen, but just to it. We just stay there, and then we get into that state of bewilderment and awe. And as we stay in that state of bewilderment and awe, we start seeing a change take place. I call this book Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao Te Ching. And it's 81 essays that I channeled from Lao Tzu. And, you know, I say that and I think, oh, but you know what, I'm 66, it's going to get a little weird now in these last— and when it does, I'm going to point it out so that you don't think I don't know that it's a little weird that I'm channeling a 2,500-year-old Chinaman. But I want to tell you how this happened and then end with something that's— I can't even wait to give you what's going to happen in the last hour. I can hardly wait to get to that one. It's so good, but I got to go through this first. This is even better. So the book was called A Million Little Pieces. Many of you saw it, know about it. It became a huge bestseller. This was before anybody had spoken anything about it. James Fry. And then this huge controversy came up about a memoir and whether all the facts were straight. And he was a drug addict. He was addicted to heroin. He was addicted to crack cocaine. He was drinking 2 or 3 bottles of vodka a day. He was 27 years old. He was days away from death. He was dumped off at, uh, up in Minnesota, a place called Hazleton, and went into rehab. And he wrote his account looking back on it from 18 years of sobriety, looking back on it. And some of the facts were shifted and changed. And as one of my children said, he was a drug addict and he exaggerated Duh, is that a big surprise? And the whole controversy that emerged on this subject and so on overshadowed the importance of this book and this man and what it did for so many people whose lives were just ripped out from under them with drugs, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, legal drugs, whatever. It's a huge huge problem we face in our society today. And it isn't just illegal drugs. It's like you're getting bombarded every day on television, on the radio, on Time magazine, full-page ads, USA Today, whatever, with more and more and more inclinations to go to your physician and tell them which drugs that you want. And they are invested in the drug companies, and the drug companies are making billions of dollars and charging $10 for a pill that costs a penny, and then the chances of getting an erection that lasts 4 hours is— that's very real in there, you know. There's got to be a lot of sexual dysfunction in this country because there's a commercial every 2 minutes, isn't there? I don't know. If I have an erection that lasts 4 hours, going to my doctor is the last place I'm heading. I'm telling you that right now. I have several stops I want to make before I show up at the doctor's house. So I read this book, and I was fascinated by it, being a camel myself. A camel is an animal who starts out every day on his knees, he goes to bed every night on his knees, and he goes 24 hours without a drink. I've been a camel for 19 years now. I go to bed and wake up. And addiction is something I'm very, very, very familiar with. With very much of an addictive personality. I started running in 1976. I ran 8 miles when I finally got to 8 miles, and then it was 1998, it was 22 years later, and I was still running 8 miles every single day for 22 years. Some call it obsessive, some call it addictive, and, uh, and I've been down that road with, uh, things like nicotine and things like alcohol and drugs and And caffeine and sugars and things like that have all been things in my own life that I showed up to. And one of the things I've come to know is that everything that you have to deal with, every problem that you face, every struggle you have to overcome, whatever it might be, as the Tao teaches, it has— good fortune is hidden in all misfortune. You have to know that. And that the way that the Tao works is that nothing sustains itself. The same. So that every storm that shows up in your life, every storm that shows up in the world, has calmness hidden within it and has a drought hidden within it as well. And it's the way of things. The only constant is the Tao. But the problem with the Tao is, as it says in the first chapter, is that the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. So you can't talk about it. You have to just experience it. You have to go within and come to know that there is a constant There is an energy, there is a force from which all things originate. All things originate, including you. And particles themselves do not create more particles. So you didn't come from a particle. You came from an energy field that allowed a particle to formulate in a split second called creation. That's the way of Tao. And returning to Tao, verse 40 of the Tao Te Ching says that Returning is the way of Tao. Returning is the way of Tao. Returning and yielding. Your job is to return to the place from which you originated. Now some, including the poets, suggest that the only way to do that is through death. T.S. Eliot, the great— he was actually born in St. Louis. I don't know if most of you knew that. In 1888. Died in 1965 at the age of 77. Said, "We shall all— we shall cease from exploration, and at the end of our exploring will be to return to the place from which we started and know it for the first time. We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all of our exploring shall be to return to the place from which we started and know it for the first time." He's suggesting in that poetic offering for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature 1948. He's suggesting in there that the only way you'll ever know it is to die. You'll return to the place from which you came, and at your death you will know where you came from in that originating place and know it for the first time. Now, I don't like to argue with T.S. Eliot or Lao Tzu, but I would suggest that we can return and enter into a state of God-realization and harmonize ourselves with Tao now and activate it and create it and in the process gain all that the originating force allowed or intended us to become, which is what we signed up for before we came. It's possible now, and I'll be talking a little bit later about how to access it and what happens when you do. For now, when you read, or if you do read, a million little pieces, you discover that this young man in his 20s, when he went into this rehab facility to overcome something that, um, when people reach that level of addiction, very few ever survive it. People who do crystal meth, they say they have, uh, 6 out of 100 recover from it. 94 end up dying. And that's in an epidemic where I live on Maui. It's called ice. 6 out of 100 is the success rate. 94 are going to continue taking it. They're going to get something called meth mouth, which means your teeth turn to the consistency of a peach and fall out, and your body deteriorates. And that stuff is out there, and that's just one. So he was doing that as well, but something happened to him in there, and he had a much bigger assignment, if you will, or sign up Because while he was in this rehab facility, he refused to do the things that the program prescribed for him. He wouldn't do the AA thing. He didn't do the 12 steps. He thought that he didn't want to substitute one kind of addiction for another. He found himself putting it all down, being very resistant to any kind of authority, being very much like the kind of behavior that probably got him going in that whole world of addiction in the first place. But what he did do every day is read the Tao Te Ching, the 81 verses, which you can read in about 81 minutes. Only takes a minute to read a verse of the Tao Te Ching, and then you can study any one of them for a lifetime, as you'll hear a little bit later on. So, um, as I would read through this thing and see him resisting the first step and the second step and not going to meetings and not doing any of the things and being very just resistant to any kind of authority. But he kept saying, "The Tao, the Tao." And all this time while I was reading it, I see, I knew about the Tao. I knew about Lao Tzu. I sort of had a vision of what he looked like and based on paintings and renderings that had survived over centuries, but I had never really studied it. I taught a course in philosophy at a university. Back in the '70s, and I would do one lecture on Taoism, just sort of skim through it and get on to the real stuff, you know, because the Taoists don't believe in a God that is a white dead male in heaven floating around as a cosmic bellboy who is going to offer you, if you pray hard enough, to something outside of you. As Carl Jung, who was a Taoist, said that the surest way to lose your soul is to believe in a God that exists outside of yourself. The surest way to lose your soul. He also said that the purpose of organized religion is to prevent as many people as possible from having a direct experience of God. A direct experience. A knowing God. So the Tao doesn't teach about knowing about God, the Tao teaches about knowing God. And the Tao sees God in nature. And in yourself and in all things, inescapably connected to all things, the source of all creation. It does nothing, but it leaves nothing undone. Doing nothing and leaving nothing undone is a wonderful paradox. Try it sometime. I've been doing that even in my swim in the morning on the ocean, on the Pacific. I've been practicing swimming by doing nothing, but just letting my body do what it knows how to do. Just letting it move through the water without my having any effort and just watching. A good example of it right now is there's, what, 1,500, 2,000 people in this room? There's not one person in here who's beating his heart or her heart, and yet every heart is being beaten. So the Tao teaches all of us that you're doing nothing, you're just being done. You're in the process of being done by a force that is handling everything for you and handled it from the very beginning. Very interesting, because the first 9 months of your life From the moment of conception until the moment of birth, in those first 9 months, you totally stayed out of the picture, and so did everybody else. It's just, you totally surrendered. You just let go, as they say in the recovery movement. You let go, and what? You let God. You just let God. So you didn't have a nose when they took a little picture in there, but you didn't go through praying, oh God, please deliver me a nose. Don't put a bump on it and don't make it look too this or too that. And you handled— everything got handled in exactly divine timing, divine perfection. And you just let go. And so did your mother. You just let go and allowed and allowed. And it all happened. And then you were born and you said, good work, God, I'll take over from here. And so did your parents and all of your neighbors and your culture. Will take over. Nice work. And the moment that you did that, you made your biggest mistake. And the Tao, myself here today, teaching about how to get back to that place of doing nothing but leaving nothing undone, allowing rather than resisting, not fighting. So synchronicities begin to happen when the passion is there. And I had finished this book on inspiration and this brand new book about balance. Called Being in Balance, which has just come out. I'm so proud of, about aligning ourselves and staying connected to our source and keeping a balance between our habits and what we desire. And as always, it's like when you have the passion and when you know you're being used, you know, when you start realizing that you're being done, like your body's being done, you know that. I mean, this is a city that has the largest number of plastic surgeons per capita than any city in the world. Yeah, right here, Scottsdale, Arizona. There's one right across the street when I was running this morning, about 400 doctors in there. But you can plasticize everything in your body. It doesn't make any, any difference. It's still being done, and it's going to leave in divine timing exactly when it was supposed to. There's absolutely nothing for you to be concerned about. In the moment of your conception, in the moment of your movement from spirit to form, your birth was handled. Your height was handled. The color of your eyes was handled. Everything that you needed, your body structure, was all handled for you in the microscopic dot of a— on a pin, you can put a billion of these. That's how tiny it was. And everything you needed for this journey was all handled in there. Your death must have been in there if your birth isn't it? I mean, it's just all— you're just being done. And if you could be done by staying in rapport with the source from which you originated and know it for the first time, really know it, the ability to be able to attract, manifest, provide what it is that you are here for would become something which would keep you bewildered. It would keep you in a state of awe. You would see it forming. Now, reading a million little pieces, and I was in England and I picked it up and I set it down and I said, no, I don't want to carry it through because, you know, it was heavy and it was before it was in paperback and I wasn't sure if I'm gonna get— and I get back and somebody had sent me a copy and then, you know, I was sort of thumbing through it and I gave it to somebody to read and My children started reading it, and I sent it to one of my daughters who struggles with addictions even to this day, dramatically. In fact, she's right now working, working, working on her total sobriety. She's— I've just talked to her half an hour ago, and you can't imagine how much peace there is in knowing that someone is safe in a place being helped and wanting to do it, checking herself in. So, and then the author appears on a a television show that I happen to be flipping through. And then, you know, it's like it just keeps coming at you as if to say, you know, I got something for you to do and you already signed up to do it a millennia ago or 2,000 millennia ago. You know, how do I get your attention? You got to do it because unless you just keep saying, I can't do that, or it won't work, or I don't have the ability, or I don't have the luck, or these kinds of things have never worked out for me before. Or whatever it might be, those things that we call resistance begin to become our mode of dealing with it. And before you know it, resistance is what we start believing in. And then we start believing in our limitations, and we start arguing for them and defending all the reasons why it can't happen, when all you have to do is be in love. All you have to do is be in love. All you have to do is stay in love. Stay in that place of ecstasy and then just watch. Just watch. And you'll see it showing up in so many ways. I was still not knowing what this was about.

I don't have a drinking problem.

It's been 19 years, alright? That's recover, okay? That's not still working on it. That's not an issue. It's not even a possibility for me. But there it was. And the only thing that kept this man who was destined to die in a few short months from going back to it was the Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell's version of the Tao Te Ching, who's an American. So I was thinking about it, and every time I talked to my friend, he would tell me about this, and you got to read this. And I said, Reed, I got so many other things I'm working on. And he said, you've got to read this. Why are you bugging me, telling me what I got to read? You know, do you know what I'm talking about? This, this is just my experience, but you, you get these, these things are happening to you now. Even being here, even something I might have said or something, whatever it might be, already somebody's here who didn't even know they were going to be here this morning and still don't even know who I am. And you may be wondering, what am I doing here? And when's he going to get to the point? And what's the, you know, what? And the point is you're here and there's no accidents in this universe. There's an organizing intelligence that's supporting everything, the whole thing. Is all held together. That same force that's beating every heart in this room is holding the planet in alignment with all the rest of them, and opening the flowers and closing them, and providing us with the trees and the food. It's like the whole thing is all being done. And so I accepted a speaking engagement out in Wyoming, which I didn't want to take, last summer, September, I guess a year ago last September, to speak for some Grand Teton conference or something out there. And I was speaking, I was in England in fact, and when I left England, I told the woman that kept calling me and calling me, a lot like these two here, like Liz and her mother, giving me wonderful people, and I mean that. I said, look, I'm flying in from England and then I've got to go to Wyoming, and I said, there's no flights for that, and I was, you know, using all the things. I said, it's just not possible, I simply just can't go there. She said, there's no problem with that. I'll send— we'll send a plane. Her sister's married to Oscar de la Renta, okay, who likes the sister as much as his wife. And, uh, so we'll send Oscar de la Renta's plane to you and we'll pick you up. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. My daughter has got to— you know, I don't do it unless she goes with me. And she's gonna— and she— he said, that's no problem. She can get on the plane too, and then we'll fly her back to where they're— there we were flying across the country on this private plane landing in Jackson Hole and, uh, going off to this Grand Teton thing. And I get the talk, and, uh, that, uh, that night I met, uh, a woman who was also speaking the next morning and doing a workshop at the same conference. Her name is Byron Katie. I'm sure many of you have heard of her. She's wonderful, wonderful being, one of my all-time favorite human beings on the planet. And I was going through some particular difficulty at that time, family and stuff. And, and, uh, when I finished my talk about 11, she stayed up with me till almost 3:00 in the morning and worked with me doing something called the work. Her whole idea is that we have all of these thoughts, we have so many thoughts that we have every single day. The only problem is that, uh, most of them are not true. In fact, hardly any of them are. And yet we act as if they are, and we live by these truths that, uh, He must love me, and you must do this, and things must be that way. And none of them are true. The opposite is just as likely to be true of almost every thought that you have as the thought that you have. And she shows you how to do that in something called The Work. Now we've put together a program together. I spoke with her out in Pasadena for an all-day workshop. They're putting it out, and we're like very, very close friends. So I'm talking to her, and she said, my husband is here with me. And I said, oh, what's his name? Oh, his name is Stephen Mitchell. I said, "Oh, really?" Yeah, she's married to the guy who translated the Tao Te Ching. So I said, "Enough!" You know, in Hawaii they have this thing, it's called "Nuff already! Nuff already!" That's how they talk, right? So I began reading through it, and then I saw the whole controversy, and I just felt that he didn't get a fair shake there. I think when you have a choice to be right or to be kind, Picking kind is really important, and he made a big mistake by not having a disclaimer at the beginning that some of the facts had been changed. But the man had helped so many people, and you know what? After I read it, I pick up the phone because his publisher had dropped him, and I said, look, I talked to Louise, Louise Hay, who's my publisher, and I said, you know, they're going to drop this guy from publishing. And she said, whatever he wants to publish, we'll publish, and we'll pay them whatever he was being paid.

That's Louise.

So I called I found— I got his number from Stephen. He had also forgotten to give credit to Stephen for the Tao Te Ching quotes throughout The Million Little Pieces, but he didn't know. He was, you know, he didn't know. And as soon as he found out, he corrected it, which he was willing to do with everything else as well. He's such a decent, really good, beautiful human being. And I called him and I told him about my daughter who was in rehab and was struggling with addictions and all of that. And he said, what's her name? And I said, look, if you just talk to her for 5 minutes, just for 5 minutes, because she read your book. It would mean so much to me, so much. And he said, I'll talk to her for 5 hours or 5 days, or I'll move in with her for 5 weeks if that's what it takes. I'll do whatever it takes to help her. And he did, and called her and encouraged her to stop the bullshit, as he said. Stop all of the excuses and get on, get on with your sobriety. And It made a huge impact in her life, so you can imagine I'm a bit of a fan. So this thing, this thing from this, called the Tao Te Ching, which he told me, he said, I read it every day, I read it every day, and each day when I read it, it was the only thing that got me through it, because I fought all the rest of it, and I thought, if somebody can be in that state where they're so close to death, And something written 2,500 years ago by a little Chinaman who just gave this to a guard and dictated it and said, these are the essential truths of life and live them. I said, I've got to get into this thing. I've got to get in. And I talked to my publisher. I talked to Louise. I said, I'm going to write. I'm going to take each of the 81 verses of the Tao and I'm going to write for a year. And I started January 1st. Of this year, and I'm gonna start and write an essay every 3 or 4 days. But before I do, what I want to do is create a place, and this is something I really want you to think about. I want you to create a sacred place in your home, in your bedroom, wherever it might be, in your office, in your garage. It doesn't make any difference, and you don't need to have— you can live in a one-bedroom apartment and do this. And in this sacred place I'd like you to put your energy into it. I have a place like this on Maui, and it's a place that I revere. It's just a little dining room, but in it, it has everything that has sacred value to me in it. Books that people have sent me, photographs, crystals that people have offered to me in the way of— I had 4 different drawings of Lao Tzu. And I had them framed 8x10, and I have them right there as I look at them, along with one of Sai Baba, my teacher who comes and visits me in my soul, in my dream, in my heart, and has the gift of fish and loaves on this planet today. We'll be celebrating his 80th birthday in 2 weeks. And there's this person who has this gift of fish and loaves, has manifested for me a Ziploc bag, a quart bag, you know, like the kind you take on the airlines, filled with Vabuti. My answer to the airlines and not taking shampoo on a plane is right here, I want you to know. So in this sacred space where I light a candle every morning, in fact I light 3 candles, one to Lao Tzu, one to Ralph Waldo Emerson whose 8x10 photograph is in front of me, and one to Sai Baba. And they are there. And it may sound silly, but what happens as I walk by this sacred spot in my home where I do this writing with all of these things that are in it, as I walk by, I get up at 3 o'clock in the morning, as you know, if you watch the PBS show, between 3 and 4 every morning. And in that quiet time when you're closest to God, as again Rumi said, that breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Do not go back to sleep. Do not go back to sleep. You're all awakened between 3 and 4, virtually every one of you. That wake-up call is not an accident. It's a universal human experience. It's the quietest time. It's the time when there's the least distractions. God's one and only voice is silence. Silence. That place where you can be connected And as you get up and fill your body with the supplements that you take, with the antioxidant drinks that you take, with whatever it is, the Nanogreens that I drink, and all of the things that I fill myself with in the morning with this healthy, wonderful feeling of good things going through my body. Not coffee, not cigarettes, not poisons, but really life-affirming food. And as you walk by this place with the candles burning and so on, it will draw you into it. It will draw you there. You feel as if you have to enter this space, whatever it might be, your sacred space. And when you sit down in that space in the middle of the night and allow yourself to know that what you are here for is now going to be made manifest for you, you begin to allow it to come through you. Now come on, everything is channeled. God writes all the books and builds all the bridges. I mean, who do you think is delivering this talk? This is just René Wayne Dyer. This isn't me. This is like these words that are coming here from where? Where are they coming from? Who owns these words that come here and go into this little thing that I'm holding in my hand and titillate the stapes in your in your ear so that you can hear these vibrations. We don't own any of this stuff. This isn't mine. I don't get any of this. I get the royalties, you know, but it's not— it's like you begin to realize that you can be used as an instrument, as a vessel for anything. And when you get your ego out of it— and that's what Lao Tzu teaches more than anything else about leadership, particularly about leadership particularly, and this is that the great leaders emulate the ocean. And what is the ocean but the greatest source of power on the planet? And why is the ocean the greatest source of power on the planet? Because it stays low. All of the rivers and all of the streams are all in work at flowing toward the ocean. It all flows back. And it flows back because the ocean doesn't lord itself over anyone. It practices radical humility. It stays low. It interferes not at all. It just allows. It allows everything. Non-interfering is probably the basis, the basis of the Tao. And we need to have an awareness of this in our leaders, the eventually leadership, political leaders, community leaders, business leaders, when we have enough of us, and I'm doing a whole, I'm doing a weekend seminar on Living the Tao, inviting people from all over the planet to come to Maui next October, and to be there for a way of living the Tao and putting it into practice everywhere in our lives. So that, I think it's the 57th verse of the Tao, says that any country which has most of its energy invested in weapons is not of the Tao. And any country that has most of its energy invested in building homes and growing food for the masses and not interfering with them is connected to the Tao, is living the Tao. From a distance, from a great distance, if you were to look at this planet— now I've been writing from a distance for the last year. Yesterday morning was the first morning this year that I got up and I didn't have to— I wasn't required by my inner passion to study the next verse of the Tao and then walk it for a day and then think about it and meditate on it. What a job. Incredible job. I can't even imagine what they pay me for. Just— that's all I have to do is get up, read the Tao, ask, and then meditate on it, swim on it, do yoga on it, all of the things that I do every day. And then one day before I write it, look at these pictures of Lao Tzu, one sitting on an oxen, and ask him, You wrote it 2,500 years ago. The language is a little different than our language today. How do people apply this today in the 21st century? How would— what would you say? And then I just put my arm on the table and allow it to flow through my heart and onto the page with my little purple pen and my white pad of paper. And it just— there's writer's block is impossible when you're living your passion. When you're living your passion, you're living with God. When you're living with God, you're living love. You are not— and what does A Course in Miracles say? There's only two emotions.

What are they?

Love and fear. And all that is love, what? Cannot be fear. And all that is fear cannot be love. So fear and God are opposites. There's no fear, there's only love. And when you're in love, when you're in love, when you're in love and allowing There's no blockages. There's no obstacles. All you have to do is align yourself in such a way that you allow it to happen. One of the great books that has just come out, just came out last week. I spoke up in San Francisco and I had 10 cases of these shipped up there in San Francisco. This is to me the deep, deep profound, the, the profound teaching on the planet today. I learned so much from this. It's called The Law of Attraction, Esther and Jerry Hicks. Just came out and it's all of the basics of the teachings of Abraham. So from a distance, it's a beautiful book. It's really worth reading. It's one you want to study the teachings. I'll go a little bit into it a little bit more later on. But the idea of from a distance is that here's 2,500 years have passed, 2,500 years, but there's no time. So it's like Lao Tzu is here and I could easily be getting the same information that was given to him. To give only in the language of the 21st century. Why not? Why would there be anything to stop that when you think like that? And the Tao doesn't teach you to think big. It teaches you to think small. Thinking big is a mistake according to the Tao, because when you think big, you can't get big things done. We can only do things in this moment. So it teaches us to be in this moment. It says, You can get anywhere from here. You can get anywhere from here. The key is you have to be here. Like, you have to totally be here so that anything big that you want to do— like, 19 years ago when I decided to give up alcohol, or when it was decided for me because I was just being done, I did it. I know what addiction's about, then I can teach about it. I lived in an orphanage for 10 years so that I could understand self-reliance, then I could teach it. It's really simple. Hi there, my name is Liz Dawn and I am the co-creator of Celebrate Your Life events, and I hope you're loving this amazing workshop with the late and great Dr.

Wayne Dyer.

This was recorded live at one of our Celebrate Your Life conferences, and I'm so excited that we could share this very special workshop with all of the Evan Carmichael fans. And to learn more about us, just click the link below and visit celebrateyourlife.com. You go through what you have to go through, even the torturous things that you have to go through, in order to be able to give. Because the most important thing that you can learn, according to Lao Tzu, is that when you are at one with what is called the hidden virtue, the hidden virtue, which is the hidden godliness, kindness, goodness, love that is in you and what you came from, when you are in harmony with that, All of your life is about giving. When you're not in harmony with the hidden virtue, all of your life is about getting. So you make the shift from getting— what's in it for me, how much am I going to make, how well am I going to do, what does my ego say— to how may I serve, what may I give, how can I do it. And if I'd have thought 19 years ago that I was going to not be able to have another beer for 19 years, it's too big.

It's too big.

You can't even do that. You can't not drink for 19 years. You can only not drink now. And that's easy. So you don't— even if you've got a great big project in mind, you bring yourself down, bring yourself down to what can we do here now, today? And that's what you do. What you can be here now, which is what all of nature knows to do. Every raccoon knows this. Every bat knows this. So from a distance, I've been talking to this man and wondering at the beginning, who am I? Do you know how many translations there are of the Tao that I came across when I googled it? When I didn't google it, my daughter googled it. I don't know how to google anything. I don't even have a computer. I've never done an email. I don't do emails. There's about 7,000 translations that that just are translated into English of the Tao Te Ching, of the 81 verses. So, and they're similar, and some say this, and some use that word and this word. And I picked a dozen of the ones that seemed to be the most relevant. And I read each time, I would read 12 translations of the first verse of the Tao Te Ching, and then I would meditate on it, and then I would do yoga on it, and I would allow myself to just let it come into me. And sometimes when I would read one, I just thought, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to— I just— and then I would let go of that. And just amazingly, and especially, especially when I would enter that sacred space, especially, it would just flow. It's just— I can only say it with all the passion that I feel it right now in this moment. It works if you're willing to let go, if you're willing to go back to what your life was like in the first 9 months. And surrender and not worry and get out of the way and then be in a state of just gratitude. If the only prayer you say every day, every day, the only prayer you say is thank you, that's enough. You're on your way. It's staying in that state of gratitude and knowing and never fighting it. And whatever comes, even if it doesn't make any sense to you whatsoever, you embrace it. You embrace it because that passion that you feel is God speaking to you. Saying, don't die with your music still in you. Don't get to that place. Everything looks different from a distance when you get back. Imagine stepping back and looking at this entire planet from a distance. And I kept thinking about that, and every time I would look at this picture of Lao Tzu and I would ask, and then the day before, the writing would be so sweet, so perfect, and I'd call my editor and I'd read it. I I'm Lao Tzu. What's going on here? I'm going to be speaking Chinese next. It was overwhelmingly powerful to do this. And then I heard a song written by Julie Gold in 1985, and it was sung by Bette Midler in 1990 at the outbreak of the Gulf War. It touched me to a point where I got that goose flesh, which I'm getting right now, when I heard that song. Written by a 30-year-old girl. There's so many beautiful words in that song. I mean, does that war make any sense from a distance? I mean, when we look back and we look back at training people to go and kill other people, the Taoist says the people— when you go to war, it says that the people will prevail who have no enemies, even if they have to go to war, and that all victories should be treated as a funeral. As a funeral. And an apology needs to be offered to all of those who were vanquished, saying we just didn't know a better way, but we'll figure one out. No enemies. Imagine a world in which there are no enemies. From a distance, I've been sitting there writing across the miles and across the centuries, listening to someone speak to me when I don't even hear the voice. I just let it flow, and it flows out in perfect harmony. 540 individual pages, handwritten, which will be edited, all without one moment without one moment of consideration for writer's block or not knowing whether it will happen. From that same perspective, for every single one of you in this room, there is an awareness that there is something grander and greater that awaits you when you get back to that first 9 months of your life, where you surrender and let go and allow it to come and flow. I want to read something to you from Carl Jung, who was a Taoist. I mean, he lived and talked and wrote a lot about the Tao. I was a Jungian therapist. I was trained in that discipline many years ago. It's called The Stages of Life. Now, there's a morning and an afternoon of your life, which is I'm going to write next, starting January 1st. I'm going to start on this. The morning of our life doesn't have anything to do with your age. Some people never have a morning of their life, like Jesus, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the great spiritual teachers. They just show up and they don't have to go through certain kinds of things that we are trained. But I had a morning of my life and an afternoon, and I'm in an evening. The morning of our lives, we are taught certain things from the time that we emerge from the womb. And what we are taught when we emerge from the womb is almost everything the opposite of living Tao consciousness, living the hidden virtues, living God realization. In the presence of a God-realized being, the laws of the material world do not apply. They just don't apply. Healing can take place instantaneously for anything. The right person can show up right out of nowhere in the biggest surprise that you've ever had. You can be in more than one place at the same time. You can manifest whatever it is that you need. It'll just be there, and it'll be too weird for you, but it'll just— there it is. When you get in the presence, or when you yourself enter God realization, that's what I'm calling the afternoon of our life. Generally speaking, it takes place somewhere between the ages of 31 and 44, 45. Generally, very generally speaking. But by and large, in the morning of our life, you learn from the people around you who are doing their absolute best to raise you to be good citizens, very likely. Mothers and fathers and grandparents and cultures and the church organizations and all the things. But most of it is designed to get you to fit in, to be a good person, to be a good family member, to follow the rules. To get good grades, to save for the future, to put your money away, to make sure that nobody steals your money from you, to have goals, to get through this class and that class, to get through this degree and that degree, to graduate, to get it to a certain job, to do whatever it takes on the job in order to get yourself a promotion. All of it being organized around getting more, attracting as much as as you possibly can get. It's about getting. It's about getting, and it's about pleasing, and it's about fitting in, all of which are non-Tao principles. All three of those are total non-Tao principles. But that doesn't matter. It's not about the Tao when you're getting the morning of your life. And then something happens. What I call a quantum shift takes place, and you move into something called the afternoon of your life or the evening of your life. And here, your values, your desires, what it is that is important to you have done a complete radical shift. It's no longer that important thing for you to be a good family member. It's no longer the most important thing for you to please your parents. It's no longer the most important thing for you to do to save for the future, to get good grades, or even to get a good house, the right house. You begin to feel a sense of connectedness to everything and everyone from a distance. You look at this planet and you think, how could anything on here be fighting each other? We're all breathing the same air. We're all. We all came from the same place. How could there possibly be enemies when you look at it from that? There's an interconnectedness. That's why I've often said that it makes about as much sense to have a smoking section in a restaurant as it does to Have a peeing section in a swimming pool. You know, it's just. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't pee 'You don't pee over there. That's not a peeing section. Over here is where you pee.' Sounds a little crazy to me. Now you have to step inside to get a breath of fresh air. A breath of fresh air. Yeah, I said that right. So we start in the afternoon of our life. There is a shift. And the shift is usually preceded, not always, but it can be, and I invite you to open yourself to the possibility that you can invite in a quantum shift, and I'll describe it for you in just a moment. And as you, as you get to one of these quantum shifts in your life, things that were so important to you in the morning of your life no longer are important. And I suggest that most people who would attend a conference such as this here in this beautiful place on these beautiful days and sit and listen to speakers from all over the world come and talk to you about it that virtually everyone in this room is moving into or has moved into something called the afternoon of your life, in which the general priorities of your life, what you expect out of it, what you expect to do while you're here, have shifted. And it no longer satisfies you, it no longer fulfills you to live the afternoon of your life by the rules that you learned in the morning of your life. Here's what Jung said about all of this: thoroughly unprepared We take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideas will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening. And what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. It's so dramatic and so powerful that you get to the place, whether it's in your relationships or your work or your family or your community or your country, where you know you're living a lie and it is increasingly intolerable for you to continue to do that. And people around you who are still stuck in the morning of their life are choosing to stay there and continue to seek after more, more stuff, accumulating more, getting more prestige, making more money, getting to another place, having a higher goal. People around that becomes anathema. It becomes something that you feel like an infection in your body just growing. And it isn't that these people or these events or this place or the things that you are doing It isn't that they're bad. It isn't that anybody's done anything wrong. It's that you have taken on this shift. And generally, when you make this shift— I've got the summary, just a real brief summary of how this affects men and women. When a quantum change takes place, which I haven't described yet but will, when it takes place and you move from the number one priority of your life being to get good grades, to fit in, to be a good daughter or a good mother, or to fit in with your family business or whatever it is that it might be, when that shift has completed itself and you now realize that there's something greater, something grander, something more profound— let me read to you one of the great ladies, one of the great writers ever. Her name is Lillian Smith. She wrote in the '40s. She died in the '70s, I believe, or '60s. There's an award, a literary award given in her name, the Lillian Smith Award. She wrote a book that I'm asking Louise to— it's out of print— to republish. Hopefully I'll have it by next year. It's called The Journey. And in the 1940s, she went all through the South, and she looked at integration and the ways that whites and blacks were— whites were treating blacks in the South. It had a profound change. And when you read her, she had a double mastectomy also, which was not ever even talked about when she was writing in the '40s. And her writing is so profound. But this is what she says. She says, to pray, it is so necessary and so hard. Hard not because it requires intellect or knowledge or a big vocabulary or special techniques, but because it requires of us humility. And that comes, she said, I think, from a profound sense of one's brokenness and one's need. Not the need that comes and causes us to cry, "Get me out of this trouble quick, please, God," but the need that one feels every day of one's life, even though one does not acknowledge it, to be related to something bigger than oneself. It comes out of our brokenness, the need to be related to something bigger than our puny little egos. Which convince us that who we are is our stuff and our accumulations and our achievements and our reputations. It's like we know that we need more than our stuff and our approval and our awards and our reputations to be connected. And that's a sense of brokenness, broken from spirit, broken from the return trip. Tao is the way of return. It's returning to the place from which we started and know it for the first time. And she says, "But the need that one feels every day of one's life, even though one does not acknowledge it, to be related to something bigger than oneself, something more alive than oneself, something older and something not yet born that will endure through time." That was Lillian Smith writing in the introduction to The Journey, that out of this need to overcome this brokenness, comes, uh, comes the afternoon of our life, comes this time when, when we say, my connection to God, to Source, to Tao, to Universal Mind, to Spirit, to that from which I originated, from which I can never be disconnected, which is who and what I am, my own divinity— it's never too late to teach that. And it's never too early to teach that. You can do it with your babies. This is why I've written— I've got two little children's books, two wonderful children's books. One's called Incredible You, and the other one just came out, it's called Unstoppable Me. So now we enter this thing, this change, this something takes over for us. And this thing called a quantum shift or a quantum change in our hearts. Takes over. And once it does, there's no going back. So now, well, let me describe first the quantum shift, the quantum change. In a book called Quantum Change, they suggest that when these things come into your life and the shift is on, that the experiences are so dramatic that they often are accompanied by voices that we hear. And an energy that we experience in our life that no one else knows. Here's a friend of mine, his name's Bill W., Bill Wilson. Yeah, for those of you who don't know why they're clapping, he was the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. And before Bill W., when you had alcoholic psychosis, you just died. It was incurable. And he found something where he brought spirit and God and helped people to return to the source of well-being from which they originated and to live from there, which requires nothing external to ourselves in the way of substances. And he said these words about this— it's called the mystical type of quantum change. He said, my depression deepened unbearably, and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly at the notion of a power greater than myself. That's the ego at work. But finally, just for a moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once, I found myself crying out, if there is a God, let him show himself. I am ready to do anything, anything. And suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in the mind's eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind, not of air but of spirit, was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. A wind of spirit. It happened for me when I left drinking 19 years ago. It was 4:07 AM and I awoke and I had been thinking about this whole thing because I wasn't, and I never have been, and I am not now an alcoholic. I drank every day. I drank 2 or 3 beers in the evening. I was never drunk. I just walked away from it when I had enough. None of the symptoms of alcoholism. I've had other, many other labels that I've placed on myself, but that happens not to be one of them. I had a teacher in India who told me, if you want to reach the level of consciousness that you were destined to reach, and that is your vision, you have to leave alcohol behind. And I said, I have no trouble with that. I just want to have a couple of beers each day after I run. And he said, "No, you will do it, and when you do it, it will be easy." And I awoke at 4:07 AM, and I couldn't remember a day in the previous 15 years that I hadn't had at least 2 or 3 beers. And the room changed. There was like almost like a spray in the room. It was like— I can still smell it. It was a smell of almost like roses in the room. And I can remember everything that was on the dresser. I can remember the clothes that were hanging in the closet. I can remember the color of the sheets, exactly what I was wearing at that moment, everything about that room I can still remember. And in the quantum change, they said there are 4 qualities or characteristics that come to you when you experience one of these shifts, and you can call upon it. One is that they are always a surprise. Two is that they are extremely vivid, very vivid, almost as if you're looking through different lenses and the colors get sharper and brighter. They are also always benevolent. That is, they are always— you feel like you're in the presence of something that is just overwhelmingly loving. I'm getting it now. It's like a Kundalini. It's like a warm shower just running up and down your spine. It feels like pure love. It's why I always enter the room from the back. You can feel the love. You can feel that. And in one of those moments, you're in a benevolent experience. And fourth is that it's always enduring. So it's surprising, it's vivid, it's benevolent, and it endures. And it's 19 years later and it happened yesterday. There was never even a thought of having alcohol again. And it wasn't like I stayed away from it, I worried about it, I didn't go to places. It was just out of my life. It was one of those quantum shifts. Now you don't have to have a moment like that. It doesn't have to be where you have this magnificent kind of hearing a voice. Many people do hear voices. It can be anything at all that is so profound for you that you know that you have been visited by a force that you have always been connected to, but you're now listening to for the first time. And when it happens for women, before one of these experiences, their number 1 through 5 priorities in their life, when asked to list the values that were most most significant to them out of 60 choices, they picked: 1, taking care of my family; 2, being independent; 3, having a career; 4, fitting in; and 5, being attractive. Those were the qualities and characteristics, the values that women picked. After one of these quantum experiences, the number 1 priority was their personal growth. The 2nd was their self-esteem. Feeling good about myself. Third was spirituality and staying connected to God. Fourth was a sense of happiness, my own personal happiness. And five was living in a spirit of generosity and giving. That was the shift that took place. That's a major shift. From taking care of my family to my own personal self-esteem and feeling good about myself. To— now for men, before and after, the number 1 through 5 qualities or characteristics, values out of the top 60 listed was, for men it was, this is before one of these quantum shifts, was wealth, the accumulation of wealth, which is what we're trained in, isn't it? Secondly was a sense of adventure. Third was feeling a sense of achievement in my life. Fourth was my own personal sense of pleasure. And fifth was to be respected by others. After one of these experiences, a visitation from Tao, a connection, a reconnection to source, the number one quality and characteristic of a man, and this happened for me for sure, was spirituality. The second was personal peace. The third was family, taken care of and loving family. The fourth was living God's will or living at God realization. And the fifth was honesty. Look at the shifts. Look at the— look at what happens, what takes place when these kinds of shifts come into our lives. When we go from the morning of our life, when our primary purpose in life is to live out this ego, and the ego is this idea that we have of who we are that says, who I am is what other people think of me, and who I am is what I accumulate, and who I am is what I achieve. And that's what I— that's the whole focus of my life. And the problem with that as a, as a perspective of a way of living is that if you are what you have, then what you begin to realize is that when you don't have, then you aren't. And if you are what you do and you no longer can do whatever that can-do is, then you aren't. And if you are what other people think of you, and what other people think of you changes, which it always does, then who you are has no substance, no value. It's located in something outside of yourself. So it's ephemeral, and it's, um, it's devastating if you want to get to the end of your life and not be able to not have to say what Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy's famous character in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, said as he was lying on his deathbed looking up at his wife whom he despised because he felt that she was responsible for all of the things that he had to do that he was unhappy with. And he looked into her eyes as he was dying and said, "What if my whole life has been wrong?" Can you imagine? I mean, just even saying that, you know, just hurts. Inside. What if you had to go to the end of your life and say, what if, what if my whole life has been wrong? And I think about these quantum moments and how they can come and when they can come. And there's a lady here in the room who has become one of the closest people in the world to me, someone I adore. Her name is Immaculée Ilibagiza, and she was in Rwanda in 1994 sitting in a bathroom waiting to be executed by machetes, being hunted by Hutus, where they killed 1 million people from her tribal ancestry, the Tutsis. And she had a moment in that bathroom in which she was asking God, "How can I love? How can I love these people who are trying to kill me?" And she was being hunted every day from April 7th until July 4th or 5th of 1994. And they spared no one. And she was told in a voice, she was told, "You must love them. You must be able to send them love." And she said when she finally got that, a cross was placed across the room, an invisible cross that only she could see. And she knew— she didn't hope, she didn't think anymore that it might or might not— she had an absolute knowing that no one could penetrate that cross. 400 people with machetes searched that house 9 times within 90 days. It's a 2-bedroom bungalow house by American standards, and they never found her. She was just hidden with 7 other women behind a valet, clothes valet. And they never looked there. And they looked everywhere, under the beds. They even looked in suitcases for babies because they would hack the babies to death. And she wrote a book which I wrote the foreword to. And when I met her, I knew I was in the presence of an angel. It's called Left to Tell. If you don't take anything else home from this conference, read it. It's about the power of faith and what it can do to transform one's life. And when I read her manuscript, I knew I had to be involved in the publication. There's Immaculate. Immaculate, stand up, say hello to these people.

Immaculate Ilabegiza, I love you.

She's a saint who walks among us in many ways. Other ways, I have a little problem, but I traveled with her for a year and a half and she's become like I don't know, a friend and a colleague and a daughter and a loving, beautiful partner in this whole vision of transforming the world. And, um, 60 Minutes has just, uh, spent over $1 million on, uh, went back to Africa with her and reunited the, all of the women but one who died of AIDS in the bathroom and are telling her story. It'll be out, watch for it within the next few weeks or months. It's all in the can and ready to go. And it's one of the great, great shows you'll be seeing I got one left to tell. This quantum shift, when it happens, when there's a knowing within you, and I started out by talking about passion, that when you have that passion, you are in balance. That's what being in balance really means. We have desires, and these desires, when they are aligned with spirit, when these desires are so aligned with spirit that we know that this is our passion, this is God speaking to us. This is my desire, and it's not about getting for me, it's about what I'm here to give and do, because giving is what God always does, asking nothing in return. It's about giving anonymously. The great Persian poet Hafiz said, in all the history of people, in the whole history of time, the sun has never said to the earth, 'You owe me.' And then he said, 'Just think what a love like that can do. It lights up the whole world.' It lights up the whole world. And of course, in Miracles, there's this wonderful line of Jesus saying, 'If you want to be like me, I will help you. If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, than me. I will wait until you change your mind, and you will change your mind. You may have to get back to that place, and the only way getting back to it may be to die, but you will, you will change your mind. Now, I had a story, a letter come to me that is so illustrative of all that I have been speaking here about, this idea of quantum shifts, the interconnectedness of all things. And the awareness that we can get into the afternoon of our life, live out what our highest values are, and access whatever it is that we need by having passion about the outcome never being in doubt. Just having that passion. And the question is, can you do it? The question is, can you do it? Can you have the knowing? I've gotten this sort of reputation for being able to heal animals. I can't do it with people, but animals, for some reason, I have a very deep connection to Saint Francis. And people, when they brought animals to me with like these huge tumors, cancerous tumors and so on, or cat with leukemia, and they presented these cats, and for some reason, just by— and when they say, can you do this? I say, uh, Absolutely. Well, don't you have any? No, I don't have any doubt at all. It's an absolute knowing. It's sort of like when they ask Sai Baba, this divine soul in Puttaparthi in India, on his 75th birthday, are you God? They asked him in front of all the cameras with millions of people surrounding the village of Puttaparthi. He said, yes, I am. He said, and so are you. He said, the only difference between you and me is that I know it and you doubt it. Can you get to the non-doubting place, the absolute knowing that this inner beckoning, this feeling that you have inside about wanting your life to improve, about wanting to make a difference, about wanting to be closer to God, about wanting to promote peace in the world, about whatever it is that you have a knowing about, do you, are you able to banish cast it out in such a way that you're willing to invite whatever it is that's going to show up and know that it's all for your best, even if it shows up as an obstacle. So here's the letter that I received. I love this. It was written March 20th, 2006. I was having the roughest time of my life. 3 years of pain, darkness, loss, and self-pity, not knowing how to cope. As usual, I got up early to feed my horses, opened the glass door, and at my feet was a tiny baby bird covered in down. I looked her over and she was fine. I searched my entire acre, rooftop and all, trying to find her nest to put her back in safe and sound, but all to no avail. No nest anywhere to be seen. Where did she come from? And what am I going to feed her? I tried feeding her small bits of fruit. Nope. Then dug up worms. Nope. Then remembered having some seed in my garage, several different colors and sizes. Boxes of seeds, and she would eat only the red ones. But she was eating, and I was happy. She was growing fast and became friends with my dog as they played together in the yard, my dog slapping her in the face and slapping my dog back with her wings. She loved riding my horse and would perch up on top of my thoroughbred's ass and take a ride. As she grew, I would help her to strengthen her wings so she could fly, and she would fly just a few feet at a time But she always wanted to be with us—me, my dog, and my horses. Every morning, around time to feed the horses, she would be at my kitchen window, knocking. "Let me in!" or "Feed me!" or something. Once in a while, she would come in and spend the night with us, but mostly she just wanted her meal. When she finally did learn to fly, I would take my dog for a walk and I'd see her on my rooftop, watching us walk away. That's too far for me to fly. I'm scared, she seemed to be saying. And one morning during our walk, I could see her watching us. I called to her, come on, lover dover, come on, lover dover, you can make it, just try. I could see her attempting to take off, but she would back off and try again and again. As we waited for her to half a block away, I'd call her again, come on, lover dover, and lo and behold, she took off. Flapped her wings, and flew directly to my waiting hands. A half a block all by herself. By this time, she was at my kitchen window every single morning, knocking, knocking at my window for her breakfast. She would eat, then take off for the day, not to be seen until her evening meal. But she always came home. During this entire time, I was the saddest I had ever been in my life. I was alone, I was lonely, and I was afraid. Very little family and very few friends. My cousin from Buffalo called me one day to see how I was doing, and she asked me to come to Buffalo to visit for a week. I agreed to come because I thought it might do me some good. My mother agreed to take care of my house and my animals. "Mom," I said, as daughters say to their mothers, "be sure that lover-dover comes home to eat." She will come to the window when she's ready and she will knock, as hard as that is to believe. Mom laughed, but she agreed to care for Lover Dover. Nearly every day I would call Mom and ask if Lover Dover came home, and Mom would laugh and say, yes, she came to the window, she knocked, and I fed her. And she'd say, yes, well, that's a big load off my mind. She said, I brought a couple of books with me to Buffalo to read on the plane, self-help books of course. She said, I needed help with my sadness and my loneliness and my purpose in this world. And I looked everywhere, all the while asking, am I serving any purpose on this planet? Am I worthy of my blessings? Am I supposed to spend the rest of my days alone? On my way back on the plane, I pulled out my book. I hadn't started it yet, but I started reading with chapter 1. A book by Wayne Dyer, who I believe is a highly evolved spiritual master. Well, she says, I got kind of bored with the first chapter. So much for the highly evolved spiritual master. And I started thumbing through the pages, reading paragraphs here and there. And just as the plane was ready to land, I felt an overwhelming feeling of sadness. I'm going home. But to what? The chores? The walls? The silence? Who will be happy to see me when I get home? Nobody. Trying to hide the tears flowing down my face from my neighbor on the plane, I flipped to the very last page of that book. There the author says, I want to end this book with one of my favorite poems entitled Guardian Angels. It deserves to be read slowly and lovingly. Well, I cannot express the warmth in my chest the moment I read the very first line of that poem. So this was written 20 years before that. It's called You'll See It When You Believe It. And this was my turning point when I wrote this book. It was the first book that I wrote that was not about psychology. It was about spirituality. Major shift in my life. Had to talk the publisher into it, said it wouldn't work and all of that. So here's how I ended this book. A sensitive Norwegian poet, Rolf Jacobson, wrote a beautiful poem entitled Guardian Angel. It deserves to be read slowly and lovingly. I am the bird that knocks at your window in the morning, and your companion whom you cannot know, the blossoms that light up for the blind. I am the glacier's crest above the forest, the dazzling one, and the brass voices from the cathedral towers, the thought that suddenly comes over you at midday and fills you with a singular happiness. I am the one you have loved long ago. I walked alongside you by day and looked intently at you and put my mouth on your heart But you don't know it. I am your third arm and your second shadow, the white one whom you don't have the heart for and who can never ever forget you. I am the bird that knocks at your window in the morning. Now, this book, the ending of that book, I don't have the time, but it could take me an hour to tell you the struggle I had about whether to include that poem in that book or not. I put it in, I took it out. I called my editor in New York, I said, "I don't really think it's an appropriate ending to this." She said, "Then take it out." I said, "Okay, take it out." 24 hours before it was to be published, I put it back in. 12 hours before, I took it out. And the last hour before I had galley deadlines, I called up and said, "Put the damn thing in, I can't get it out of my mind." What's the connection between "Am I Was I doing it or was I being done? And was Rolf Jacobson in Norway writing this poem knowing about this woman out in Nevada who was desperate and lonely? Listen to the conclusion of her letter. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed by the message I had just received. Coincidence? I think not. That was one of the first times I had a genuine smile on my face in 3 years. It was the start of my healing and a blessing in disguise. Shortly thereafter, I never saw Lover Dover again. She didn't come home that morning or any morning thereafter. So coincidences, all of that kind of thing, the interconnectedness between all of things, the awareness that when you begin to open your eyes and shift— what would motivate her to pick up that book 20 years after it was published? Place, to carry it on a plane, and to have me— and you know, that poem wasn't even a poem that I discovered. It was given to me by my very first doctoral student, Pat Murphy, at St. John's University in New York. He said, this is so beautiful, I think you should put it in your book. Back and forth, and you're doing it, and you're back, and you're forth, and you think that you've got it all handled. Hmm. So the only thing I didn't mention was this wonderful, what I called my bathroom book. I didn't write it. But it's myself, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, who is here, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Louise Hay, Ram Dass, Bernie Siegel, Scotty Peck, Joan Borzenko. I want you to put this in your bathroom because it replaces the energy that is leaving with the highest energy of the planet. There you are. The experience of God. And so we come to the end, at least the end of my presentation here. We shall not cease our exploration. And when we finish exploring, we shall return to the place from which we came and know it for the first time. But you don't have to die to go there. You can access a quantum moment. You can make the shift into the afternoon of your life and live it by those rules rather than anybody else's that were handed to you. So you no longer have to live that lie. I close with one of my all-time favorite poems from Mary Oliver. Who I think is America's great contemporary poet. It's called "Wild Geese." You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I'll tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh, and exciting, over and over, announcing your place in the great family of things. In every moment, ladies and gentlemen, every moment of your life, you have that great choice offered to us from the Course. You can either be a host to God, the Tao, or a hostage to your ego. It's your call. The wild geese are calling you home.

Let me start with the first of these 10 secrets for success and inner peace. A good place to start: have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing. It is a principle that I learned when I was reading years ago in my 30s a book called The Discourses of Tilopa, written in the 10th century, 1,000 years ago. In India, a Vedantic scholar, and he was suggesting that a closed mind is one that says, my experiences have taught me that that's not possible. I suggest to you that you change that and rid yourself of that kind of a, of a thought. If someone says, I would like to teach you to levitate, don't automatically assume that levitation is impossible. If I were to ask by a show of hands how many people in this room believe it's possible for you to to levitate, all of you would be right whether you raised your hand or you didn't. If you don't believe that it's possible, it won't be. If you do and you decide to put unbending intent on it, it will become. I was in Boston, Massachusetts one time, and I watched the yogic flyers. What a fascinating experience. They sit with their bodies in a yoga position, that is their legs crossed and their hands crossed, And I would like you to imagine yourself in that position with your hands up here and both of your legs crossed together in a yoga position. And then I would like to ask you, how high do you think you could raise yourself up through your will? And they took the greatest gymnastic Olympic athletes, and the highest any of them were ever able to get was about 5.5 inches off the ground. And they couldn't stay at all. They went up and right back down. Back down. These are the people who have the strongest muscles and the most— the greatest athletes, if you will. And we watched these yogic flyers, and they had a— they had 6 rows, and they had all 6 of them sitting here. And then they had hurdles, 24-inch-high hurdles on in every lane. 24 inches high, low hurdles. And they had, I think, 8 of them, or maybe 10. And then they had a mat at the end of the wall down here. And they were having races, the yogic flyer races, the Olympics. I love this. And off they would go and they would start bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing with their eyes closed, bouncing, bouncing. And they'd come to the hurdle and they would go deep within and their bodies would go up and over the hurdle and they go back down and they go to do, to do. Their bodies would go up, they'd go over the hurdle and they did this. For 6 or 8 hurdles, 24 inches off the ground. And a few of them sort of were showing off. They would just stay above the hurdle for a second or two. I love those guys. Now, if you think that something like that is impossible, if you think I'm making it up, or if you think that defies all the laws of science that we know, I would like to remind you that the laws of science come from the same place that your doubt comes from, and it comes from the same place that everything in this universe comes from. When a great teacher in India was asked by one of his devotees the great question, "Where does everything come from?" He responded, "Where does your question come from?" And it is out of that void, it is out of that spirit, out of that consciousness that everything emanates, everything is created. And if you have a closed mind to that, and Anthony de Mello reminded us that almost all of our attachments are the things that are the source of all of our problems. Our attachments, primarily our attachments to being right, our attachments to money, our attachments to our belief systems, our attachments to our beliefs. I mean, so many people here really strongly— I've heard it expressed since I've been here Friday— many of you believe that the real person who needs to hear all of these messages is not here. He's back home watching the football game, and you are far more spiritually advanced. And that represents, you know, the consciousness of what your relationships are like. There's the spiritual one, and there's that asshole that's back at home, or whoever it is. And I'd like to suggest to you that that person back at home who you interpret to be the one who really needs to hear this message, that he or she or they are in your life for as profound a reason as anyone you've heard here these last weekend, that they have as much to teach you. And I really and truly don't believe that our soulmates are the people that we agree with. I believe that— I mean, I heard a woman say one time, "Well, I finally found my soulmate. Oh, it's so wonderful. He's a Republican just like me. He likes asparagus. I like asparagus." We read the same books. We both read— I go to say something and he says it before I even get a chance to get it. We are so connected. I said, that's not your soulmate. Any relationship in which two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary. Your soulmate is the person that pushes your buttons. Your soulmate is the person that can send you into a frenzy. Your soulmate is the person who, if If 99 people out of 100 say something to you, you're able to ignore it, but when they say it, you go insane. That's your soulmate, and they never disappear. You can't get rid of them. They're like the proverbial turd that won't flush. You flush, you walk away, you say, "It couldn't be bad. Couldn't be.

I got rid of you.

Showed up again because your essence, what you're here for, is about peace. It's about peace. It's about being in rapport or in harmony with that which created you, out of which you came. And I'll speak about that when I speak about intention. And anytime you're out of rapport, out of harmony, inconsistent with that source from which you emanated, you're out of peace. And anybody who can send you away from your peace is someone who came into your life to teach you the most important lessons that you have. My father walked out on our family when I was born. He never made a phone call to my mother, who had 3 boys under the age of 4 during the Depression. He spent 5 years of his life in prison. He did the same thing to 5 additional wives. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 49. In debt to everyone, a thief, and he never even made a phone call, never sent a penny in support. He just walked out. I had my 60th birthday 2 years ago. My mother was sitting there next to me and she said, "60 years ago this week I came home and your father, who you never saw, had left the house, left a note, left your brother Jim in charge of your brother Dave." Your brother Jim was 3 and a half. Your brother Dave was 17 months old, very sick, and he left a note and took all of the jewelry and everything we had in the house of value and said he had moved in with another woman who was living in Ann Arbor at the time. This was on the east side of Detroit on Piper Street. And she still harbors resentment towards this man. But in 1974, 10 years after he died, I went to his grave and I was able to express one of those 10 secrets, which is Give up your personal history. Give it up. Let go of it. Don't be attached to it. As Castaneda says, if you don't have a story, you don't have to live up to it. So get rid of your story, because everything that has ever happened to you in the past is nothing more than what you had to go through in order to get here. Pretty simple. The evidence for it is that you did. You don't really need much more evidence than that. And everything that happened back there is like the wake of a boat. The wake of a boat is nothing more than a trail that is left behind, and it doesn't drive the boat. The wake can never drive the boat. It's just a trail that is left behind. And most of us who take on egos believe that the wake of our life is what's driving the boat. That trail that is left back there is why I can't do this. In the 10th century, there was a man named Omar Khayyam, a Muslim, who wrote the Rubaiyat. Imagine, 1,000 years ago, he knew this: the moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out one word of it. Great wisdom, isn't it? And when you give up your personal history, and I carried that personal history around with me for 34 years, angry. Someone once described resentment as the poison that you take in order to kill somebody else. The 7th secret of 10 Secrets says there are no justified resentments. Everything that you justify— I have a right to be happy, I have a right to be unhappy— you'll hear people say it all the time. I have a right. If you knew who I was married to, you would understand. I have a right to be miserable. And they go around defending their right to be miserable. And when you defend your right to be miserable, you attract exactly what you're defending into your life. You just keep attracting more and more of it. I had a woman who had been divorced in therapy with me back in the '70s, and she had gone out with 4 men since her divorce, and all 4 of the men had treated her exactly the same. They had treated her as a sex object, moved on, didn't call back, were disrespectful, didn't care anything about her. And she said to me, I swear to you, in therapy, in our last session, she said, I want you to talk to all 4 of those men. And I said, there's only one common denominator in this thing. And you have to ask yourself what it is that you are doing to attract into your life that which you resent so much. Because if— well, I'll get to that in a moment. So when I went to my father's grave and I stood there, I got rid of the resentment and I walked away a free man. And I suspect that probably the most influential person in my life was my father. Because right after I got rid of all that hatred and that anger and that bitterness and resentment, the dreams I used to have about him and all the things that I just couldn't understand about how could someone walk out on such a beautiful woman with 3 boys and never even make a phone call. If I don't talk to my kids at 24 hours wherever I am, I get nervous, I get twitchy, I haven't talked to them, I got to connect. And he went a lifetime, but it was that act of forgiveness. I was overweight at that time. Right after I did that, I started running and I ran— well, I won't even want to tell you how obsessive I am, but I ran 22 years, 8 miles a day, and I never missed a day ever in 22 years. I shouldn't be so proud of that, but you brush your teeth every day, so that's not obsessive. I just ran every every day, all right? And I was drinking. Today I'm a camel. If you look on my lapel, you'll see a camel. Some of you are applauding and some of you are wondering what the hell is he talking about. A camel is an animal who starts out every day on his knees. They're wonderful animals. And they wake up every day on their knees and they go 24 hours without a drink. And I've been doing that for a couple of decades now. And, um, and there was a time when I didn't and couldn't and wouldn't and so on. And that came about when I emptied my heart of resentment. I was attracting the wrong people into my life. I was eating improperly. I was putting caffeine into my body. I was a candidate for every kind of illness you could imagine. And everything in my life changed, including my writing. I walked away from Biloxi, Mississippi, my father's grave, in 1974. I went down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I checked myself into a hotel and I wrote a book called Your Erroneous Zones in 14 days, beginning to end. Today there are 32 million copies of it in 47 languages. It happened in one 2-week period of abandoning the resentments. Vivekananda, the great teacher from India, came over and when his devotees said, how do I do this? How can I do this? How can I get rid of the ego? How can I? He said, you don't have to. He said, in the springtime, said, go out and observe the blossoms on the fruit trees. He said the blossoms vanish of themselves as the fruit grows. So too will the lower self vanish as the divine grows within you. You don't have to beat anything out of you. You don't have to defeat anything. You don't have to get it out. You don't have to work on it. You just have to let the divine grow within you, and it will push out all that has been taking up that room to attract into your life that which doesn't work. So your soulmates are people who I believe show up and teach us these things. I have 6 daughters, as I said. They are all incredibly great soulmates. They teach me more than you could ever imagine. If I raise my voice, if I do anything in my home with my children that is inconsistent with anything I've ever said publicly, or anything I've ever written, or anything they've ever seen on television, my daughter Serena, who is my ultimate all-time supreme soulmate, will put her hand on her hip and her leg out and run it up and down like this and respond— she said it to me not long ago— "I wonder what all those people would think of Mr. Positive if they could see him here this morning." Then she asked her sister, "What do you think, Summer? How many books do you think we'd be selling here this morning if they could only see Mr. Positive?" She said, "Shut up and do what I tell you." They're great. And they're soulmates to each other. Favorite line, I follow them around when I start running out of material, I say, "Come on, just say something stupid. Come on, come on. Something, anything. I need some more material." "Get out of here." Serena came down Savannah got up for breakfast one morning. She was 13. Her sister Summer was 15. And out of nowhere, Summer said to her younger sister, she said, "If you didn't have any feet, would you wear shoes?" I'm standing there, I thought, "What is this?" And Savannah can hardly tolerate anybody at 6 o'clock or 6:30 in the morning. She looked at me and said, "What are you talking about? That's ridiculous. Why do you even talk?" Why do you even breathe? You laugh because you've heard this, or you did it. Summer said, I just wanted to know, if you didn't have any feet, would you wear shoes? That's not such a bad question. She said, of course not. Summer said, then why are you wearing that bra?

Off they go.

I said, don't chase her, that's your soulmate. And attached nowhere. Attached nowhere. Letting go of our attachments. Letting go of the— particularly the need to be right. I've told you, one of the great, great lessons— I've talked about it on one of my programs— is the 4 words when you're having a conflict with anyone: "You're right about that." Whatever it is that anyone is saying to you. But you have to do it in a nice way. My wife and I have sort of got it down now, you know. Where we don't even have to say it. We just hold up 4 fingers. You're right about that. When I hold up the 4 fingers, she says, don't hold up those damn fingers either. I don't want to know that I'm right because I know you don't believe it. Now she's gotten to the point where she can hold up just 1 finger. You know, it's like when you let other people be right and you let go of your need to be right, almost all of your attachments disappear because that's what the ego does. That's what it is. That's how it works. Works on being right. It's attached to being right, and it's willing to die to be right. I was at O'Hare Airport one time, and the arm over the parking lot was broken, you know, to get out. And there was a guy inside, and the cars were backed up 30 minutes, 35 minutes, 40 minutes, and they couldn't get the arm to go up. I mean, they couldn't get— and there must have been 150 cars waiting to get on with their appointments. And finally, a guy about 10 cars up got out. I was walking, so I was independent of it. And he got out, picked up the arm, and then started to get back in his car and drive forward. And the guy jumped in front of his car and was willing to die to be right, because you don't leave unless you pay the $3 or whatever it is that you owed. And he was willing to give him the $3. He said, "Here, take what you want. I got to go to work." but he was willing to die to be right. The guy almost ran him over too. It was very— the second of these 10 secrets, and I've got to rush through them, is, um, came to me when I was 19 years old. And I, uh, I graduated from high school in 1958, and I joined the Navy to make the world safe for democracy, which I did for 4 years. You noticed there were no invasions, there were no wars between 1958, 1962, You laugh, but I was out there making the world safe for democracy. And I went to a school in Bainbridge, Maryland, cryptography school. And then I left there and I flew out to San Francisco. And my Aunt Barbara, who taught at Hayward High School, handed me a book and she said, I think it's really important that you read this book. And the book was written by a man who was at the time of his life, in his life, that he was probably the most famous man alive, more famous than the presidents, because there was no TV, no radio, none of that kind of thing that got information around the globe the way it does now. His name was Leo Tolstoy, and Tolstoy wasn't just a great writer. He was a mystic. He was a philosopher, and he also talked and wrote about and even lived in areas so esoteric. I mean, here we'd give workshops on them, but in those days, that was considered very far out. And, um, she handed me this book to read, and I was boarding a refrigerator ship in Alameda to go for the next 29 days to meet my ship, the USS Ranger, which was an aircraft carrier, in a place called Sasebo on the southern part of Japan. So I was a 19-year-old boy boarding a ship, and I had 29 days because they didn't have a lot of flights going to Japan in 1950. 58 from San Francisco. That required a lot of stops, and they didn't use it for that. That's how they transported us around. So I got about 10 or 11 days out, and I reached in my sea bag and I pulled out this book, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. And I started reading it. And Ivan Ilyich was a man who lived in Moscow. He was a civil servant. He went back and forth to work every day, but inside of him he felt something, something that wasn't quite right. He was filling out the forms, he was paying his bills, he had 3 children, he had a wife, lived in an apartment. He did everything that he, quote, was supposed to be doing. And yet there was a part of him that was knowing that he wasn't on purpose, knowing that he wasn't living a fulfilled life. He felt there was a destiny, there lying there on his deathbed looking up at his wife, and as he's about to die, he says to his wife, "What if my whole life has been wrong?" And he closed his eyes and died, and that was the end of the novel. And I took out and I started my journal on the USS Vega at that time at the age of 19, and I wrote a note to myself and it said, "Dear Wayne," and I still have it. Don't die with your music still in you. And that became the second secret of 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace. Don't die with your music still in you, and don't let your children by any means either. That this is an intelligent system that we are all a part of. There's a force in this universe. You've heard workshops about it. You've heard people talking about it. I talk about it, so many of my friends here in the front row and colleagues of mine here speak about this thing called spirit or soul or consciousness. And this intelligence that flows through everything is more than just something that we pray to and that we think of in religious context. And that's really the emphasis where I want to go here with the rest of this. Of my time here with you this afternoon is to see and understand that you showed up here for a reason. When my daughter Serena was complaining to me and bitching about this and that, and she's been doing it since she was born, so she's just good at it, you know. I adore this child. I mean, because she's my soulmate, I want to get as much as I can from her, you know. I said, you know, Serena, I'm tired, tired, tired of you telling me what kind of a father I should be. And instead of you doing that anymore, I would like you to stop right now and take responsibility yourself for the kind of father I've become. And she looked at me and she did one of these with the eyes rolled back. She said, you want to run that one by me one more time? You want me to be responsible for what kind of father you are? I said, exactly. "Exactly," I said, "before you came into this life, you needed to have a father. It's just the way it works. And you needed to have a mother. You picked mom to be your mother, you picked me to be your father, and if you don't like what it is that I do and how I do it, you shouldn't be blaming me. You should be saying, 'Why did I pick this guy anyway to be my father? Why did I do that?'" She said, "I don't remember any of this." I said, "It's not about your memory. You don't remember what you had for breakfast last Thursday. You don't remember living in your mother's tummy. You don't remember living in a crib. There's lots of things you don't remember. Trust— you gotta trust me on this one. I know what I'm talking about. This is an intelligent system we're all a part of, and you showed up here, and in order to get here, you needed parents, and you had the opportunity to pick who you needed for this journey, and this is who you picked." She said, "So you're telling me You're telling me that before I ever even got here, I picked you to be my father? I said, exactly. Here's her classic line: I must have been in a hurry. I said, well, when you're making really important decisions, slow down, you know.

These are the kind—

this is the way my house works. This is how I stay grounded in my life. There's a wonderful poet, musician in this country, man whose music I think is among the finest ever written. His name is Jackson Browne. Jackson had an album put out in the '70s called Late for the Sky and another one called The Pretender. Late for the Sky, number 6, is something that I play almost every day. It's called For a Dancer. And he goes— the lyrics go like this: Just do the steps that you've been shown by everyone you've ever known until the dance becomes your very own. Into a dancer you have grown from a seed someone else has thrown. Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go home. Because, and here's the kicker, because in the end there is one dance you'll do alone. Isn't that great? And all of his music to me is like that. I don't know a song he's written curtain that doesn't touch my soul. And I like to think of yourself, myself, as not being willing to be what others have dictated to me. And as I move into this whole field of energy and spiritual solution and intention, I'd like you to just take a minute or two or five and consider what it is that keeps us from reaching a level of consciousness in which we can play the music that we were destined to play, that we signed up to play, that we came here to play. And why is it that so many of us feel so frustrated and come to workshops and listen to tapes and read books and look for advice and get into therapy and take Prozac and, you know, I have a client who I think uses lithium as a salad dressing. You know, I mean, it's— what is— because we're just, we're living our lives that are programmed for us, and we become dancers instead of choreographers. Instead of going within and saying— Khalil Gibran, the famous Lebanese poet, put it this way. He said, "When you are born, your work is placed in your heart." It's here. In King Lear, Shakespeare says, "Go to thy bosom." Knock there and ask your heart what it doth know. Ask your heart, not here. Ask your heart what it doth know and live from that perspective. And if you've got music to play, if you've got a Mr. Holland's Opus in you, to me a great movie, just the kind of thing that sort of symbolizes what I'm speaking of, and it doesn't have to be writing a great opus, it doesn't have to be writing a book. Some of you handed me copies of manuscripts. You're going out there and you're going to do it. And I say, go for it, publish it yourself, figure it out, whatever it is. If your heart tells you this is something you have to do, you're going to get guidance. You're going to get, you know, Doreen will tell you there's angels everywhere. There's angels. This is the angel lady. She looks like an angel. She is an angel. I love her. And you know that. And they are. It doesn't matter what you call them. I don't call call them angels, but it doesn't matter what you call them. Guidance is there. Assistance is there. And when you move into intention, you access and negotiate the presence of guidance. And it's available to you, and it'll work for you, and it'll keep you away from your addictions, and it'll put you in the direction of the people that need to come into your life to help you. I had a reading today from a lady who blew me away. And she was sent to me through— I can't even begin to tell you the number of people and how it all worked for her and I to show up. And no, I met a woman in Kansas City last week who said, "I saw— I don't even know the name of this country. I had never even heard of this country, and I used to teach geography." It's Moldovia or Moldavia or Moldovan or what— how do you say it? Say it again. Moldavia. It's formerly part of the Soviet Union. It's a tiny little place. And she She saw a story about this and a little boy's picture flashed on the screen of something that she was watching on PBS. She said, "I've got to adopt a child from that country." It became her mission. She couldn't get it out of her head. Don't you have things like that in you that you feel, but— and how often do you act on them or do you keep yourself from doing it? And she went to Moldova and she's got a little boy named Pierce and he's now 4 years old. And it's like every time she sees him, she knows she's on purpose in her life. It doesn't have to be about creating. It can be about anything. And if you get to the end of your life, I mean, can there be anything more terrifying than the idea of that vision of Ivan Ilyich lying on his deathbed saying, "What if my whole life has been wrong?" I know that could never happen to me because I'm doing it right now. Just being here, being on stage, having the guidance that I have, having you here, the whole energy of what goes on. When I sit down to write, I know I'm on purpose. I don't worry any longer about whether my book is going to sell or whether people are going to like it or whether the reviews are going to be good or whether it's going to make this list or that list. It's not even relevant. I can't even conceptualize it. I write because when I see that writing table and it's surrounded by angels, it's surrounded by angelic energy. I put books, I put crystals, I put everything that's possible to put around there. And I wake up, I get up in the morning and I go out and run and I swim, and I am attracted to it. I can feel it pulls me toward it. There's such a— and when I let go and surrender and have no resentments and allow, it just flows. The concept of writer's block isn't anything I can identify with. I don't know what that means, because if I get tired and stop writing, I just have to reach over and pick up this or pick up that, or the phone will ring, or I go down to the mailbox or something, and whatever it is that I needed is always there. It's like you can negotiate the presence of guidance, of higher and faster energy, but you can't do it if you're not on purpose. You can't do it if you're going to die with your music still in you, if you're living the life that somebody else orchestrated for you. For you. So in 5 minutes, let me do what I usually take a half a day to do. Let me give you what I believe are the significant things that keep us from moving into this level. The first of these is it all goes back to a simple thing out of the Torah, out of the Old Testament: as a man thinketh, so is he, from Proverbs. And boy, there's no group that knows more about that than a group who would have just been through what you've been through this weekend. It's about the invisible energy of thought and making it work for us. As a man thinketh, so is he. We become what we think about, said Emerson, all day long. Our thoughts create our reality. You've heard it a thousand different ways. The problem is that most people don't get it, that it works both ways. It isn't like you just have to put your thoughts on what you want. And if I put my thoughts on what I want, 'Oh, and I just get into a New Age good feeling mood that everything's just going to start flowing into my life because it's what I want.' The fact is, if you keep your thoughts on what you want, and what you think about is what expands, want is what's going to continue to show up in your life. You're just going to have wants. You have to shift off of wants and into intention. But more on that in a moment. The first thing to understand is that if what you think about is what expands, and you're thinking about what's missing in your life, and you talk about what's missing in your life, and in your daily life you share what's missing with your friends and your in-laws and your mother whenever you talk to her, and you talk a lot about what is missing in your life, that's what keeps showing up. It's missing in my relationships, it's missing, I don't have any abundance, and it's missing in my I don't get this and I don't get that. If that's what you think about, and what you think about is what expands, why wouldn't you expect more of what's missing to keep showing up in your life? And it will, and it does. And self-actualizing people— I was blessed to have a great teacher in my life named Dr. Abraham Maslow, who died on the very same day in the same hour that I was receiving my PhD on the 14th of June in 1970. He died in Menlo Park, California, and I was walking across the stage, and it was almost as if he passed on a baton and said, "I've explained it to the academics of the world. Now you take it to the cab drivers and the dancers and the teachers and the parents and the musicians and everybody else." This idea of higher consciousness and self-actualization. And it gets worse. If your thoughts are on what is, not what's missing, but what is. And what you think about is what expands. And you don't like what is in your life, guess what you will continue to attract into your life? If what you think about is what expands, and you can only act upon what you think about, and what you're thinking about are the circumstances of your life, and the circumstances of your life suck, as my kids would say, then you're going to attract more of suck into your life. You have to, because it is out of what you think about that you manifest and create. It's the way it works. Don't get mad at me, I'm a reporter here tonight, okay? I didn't invent this system, I'm just a part of it. And it gets worse. If what you think about is what expands, and what you think about is what always has been, and you despise what always has been, you are going to continue to attract what always has been into your life, even though you despise Why is it? Because what you think about is what expands. As a man thinketh, so is he. Self-actualizing people never ever talk about what's missing in their life, what's wrong in their life, and what always has been in their life if they don't like it. Einstein said it's the sixth secret of success and inner peace. You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it. Everything that shows up in your life in the form of a problem is something that you have attracted into your life. You don't have to be guilty about it, you just have to take responsibility. And I'm talking about everything. The circumstances of your life are what you have attracted into them, including your illnesses. No guilt. You didn't do anything bad. You're not being punished. You attracted it into your life. If you don't own it and you believe that it happened because of something external to yourself, then that something external to yourself is going to have to change in order for you to get better. And the likelihood of that happening is pretty small. Might happen, not likely. So you can't put your energy on what is missing and what is, if you don't like what is, and what always has been. This is the way it's always been. We've always been poor. We've always been in this business. We've always done things this way. There's always been— how many times have you heard people say, we're going to war against nobody? There's always There's always been wars, there'll always be wars. Why would you want to have an energy that says there'll always be wars? I don't think there'll always be wars. I think we'll reach a level of consciousness in which wars will become something that we'll look back upon and say, "Imagine those people, they actually used violence to settle their problems." That won't happen. Why would we put our thoughts or our energy on anything that we don't want to manifest? I'm on an airplane changing planes in Dallas to go to San Francisco from Miami. We've got about 10 minutes to get to our flight. One of those days where things are not landing early because they're on time because of storm clouds or something. So I'm sitting next to a lady and I said, I'm going to go, I'm going to get up there now, I'm going to go make my— She said, with my luck, she said, I will not make my connection. I'll have to wait here in Dallas. And I said to her, with my luck, I I will make my connection.

She's still in Dallas.

Why would you want to put out to the world, to the universe, to attract back into your life the idea that with my luck things won't work out? Why would you ever say that? Where could that come from? How could it— even if it's just a silly little offhanded remark, why would we have created offhanded remarks that reflect things aren't going to work out for ourselves? Ourselves, because these are the obstacles to higher consciousness. And it gets even worse. You cannot attract into your life what you intend to manifest if your thoughts or your energy are on what they want or expect for you. And there are no shortage of them. If you put your thoughts and your energy and you talk to your relatives and you're on the telephone complaining and you do this on a regular basis, if you're constantly talking about what they expect for you— this was particularly relevant when I was working with young adolescents. My mother wants me to do this, my father wants me to do that. And I would always say to them, why do you think about what they want? Why don't you put your attention on what you intend to create? Ah, but I can't do that. I can't. I said, but if you put your thoughts on it and your attention, eventually you'll have to act on it. It's like those of you who are smoking. I see some of you smoking, sneaking your cigarettes. Because you're so full of shame about your cigarettes out there. Smoke if you want to smoke, but if you don't want to smoke, or you think that smoking isn't so— put your thoughts on not smoking. See yourself as a nonsmoker. Keep smoking if that's what you have to do, but keep your energy and your thoughts on, "This is something I intend to no longer do." And guess what? You will start attracting the energy to keep you from smoking. Before long, it'll be very difficult for you to get cigarettes. You'll go to buy them and they'll be out, out of your brand. You won't have enough money with you. So the universe will start reacting to the intention that you have, and it'll stop you. Same with addictions, same with losing weight. See yourself looking the way you want to look. Keep eating, have a hot fudge sundae if that's what you need to do, but put your thoughts and your attention— and don't ever allow what they want for you, which is what Ivan Illich did. And most of this is just relatives. Relatives are really good at this, having in Thoughts about what you should be. I got a great idea for a book. I got a great title. See what you think of this: Your Friends Are God's Way of Apologizing for Your Relatives. What do you think? You see, I gave this talk to your relatives last month and they applauded too. So here we go. If you can't put your thoughts on what's missing, and there's so much missing, And you can't put your thoughts on what is if you don't like the circumstances of your life. And you can't put your thoughts on what always has been. And you can't put your thoughts on what others expect for you if you don't like it. What can you think about? Where are you going to put your thoughts? How are you going to train yourself? You train yourself to place your thoughts and your energy at all times not on what you want, but on what you intend to manifest into your life. And now I would like to shift this presentation over to something called intention. And I'd like to read to you the thing that got me inspired to write the next book I'm writing. One of my great teachers, Thomas Troward, his Edinburgh Lectures and Dore Lectures. Have you read those? Are you familiar with those? They blow me away. And this is from Castaneda. Castaneda and Howard have been constant guides in my life the last few years. In the universe, there is an unmeasurable, indescribable force which those who live of the source— we call sorcerers, not hocus-pocus incantation sorcerers, but sorcerers meaning of the source— in the universe, there is an unmeasurable, indescribable force which those who live of the source call intention. And that absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attracted to intent by a connecting link. Intention, I'm using it in a context that you may never have thought of before. Intention is not what you do. Intention is that which was the future pull that was in the conceptual seed that allowed you to come into form in the first place. Place, that there are no mistakes in this universe, that every acorn has intent in it. It will never become a watermelon. There are no mistakes in it. Intent is built into that which manifests. Sorcerers, that's all of you, are not only concerned with understanding and employing that connecting link, but they are especially concerned with cleansing it of the numbing effects brought about by the concerns of living every day at ordinary levels of consciousness. You want to get to intention. I like you to think of intention as something that you are connected to because everything in the universe is connected to intent. And that intention is not something that you do with your will. You can match your will to the will of God. Or you can match your intent to the intention that is a force in the universe, but it is not an ego thing at all. You don't get to do it. And that— I'd like you to think of intention like when my mother used to come and get us when I was a little boy. I can remember being maybe 3, and we lived— I lived in Mount Clemens at that time with my brother, and my mother would come and get us and she'd take us on the streetcar on the east side of Detroit. We called them the trolleys. And the trolley, I would sit there and I would look up and they had these straps coming down from the ceiling of the trolley. And I would look up at that trolley strap and I would think, wow, what would it be like to be so tall to be able to stand down there and reach up and take a hold of that trolley strap? I could never do it because I was too little. I'd like you to think of a force of intention, a field of intention that is just 3 feet above your grasp, no matter how high you jump. I can jump, but I'm white, so I'm limited. Okay, so white men can't— you know, we can't jump, right? So however— I don't care if you're Michael Jordan, all right? However high you can jump, 3 feet above that, there's a field, an energy field that you cannot jump to. You cannot get there with this, with this body. And when you jump to this, you keep jumping, you'll always just— it'll just elude you. So what we have to do is figure out a way to float up to intent. And this trolley strap is connected to intent or intention, to a force field in the universe. And if you can figure out a way to leave your body and in your mind float up and get a hold of this trolley strap of intention, it will take you wherever you are destined to go with all of the people wherever it stops to pick up that you need to take with you on the journey of the trolley. And the right people will show up and some will be there for a little while, then they'll get off and they'll leave, and others will come in and replace them. And you are always sort of hanging on to this thing called intent. Now the reason that you can't get a hold of intention is because you're in ego consciousness. Now you can check into any hospital in this country and get a tonsillectomy, you can get an appendectomy, but you can't get an egoectomy. They just don't offer them, all right? And an egoectomy is what we need. Not to get rid of it, but just to tame it. The ego has 6 components. Here they are in a nutshell: a belief that I am what I have, a belief that I am what I do, what I accomplish, accomplished. A belief that I am my reputation, what others think of me. That's the ego. A belief that I am separate from you. A belief that I am separate from what I would like to attract into my life. I'm separate from it. It's separate from me. And 6, a belief that I am separate from God. Those are the 6 components of the ego. When you let go of those ideas and to see yourself not as separate from God, but as a piece of God, as always connected. I am in you, and you are in me, and I am in the Father, and the Father is in you. Do you know the most misconstrued line in the history of Christianity is Jesus saying, it is only through me that you will come to know the Father, that we as human beings having a spiritual experience interpreted Jesus who came here calibrated at 1,000 as a spiritual being, who said, it's the spirit that gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. This doesn't count. When he said me, he wasn't speaking about his beard and his sandals and his arms and his legs, that human being. He was speaking as that which is in all things. I am in you. How can my body my physical body be in your body? How can I be in all of you if I'm talking about the spirit?

It's that which is in all things.

And we have created a catechism of exclusion to the extent of murdering millions upon millions upon millions of people in the name of you have to take and believe in this body rather than the spirit. Which he emanated from and described and lived from. So intention is something that we can connect to. Now here's what my take on intention, and I'm conscious of the time, I've got 4 more days' worth to do in a half hour, okay? Intention is this force field, and I'd like to suggest to you that there's nothing in this universe that doesn't have intent in it, as I just read that quote observation to you, and that you are no exception. If there is no place that intention is not, if there's no place that it is not, if it's in every living thing, it must be in you. And if it is in you and there's no place that it's not, it must also be in whatever is missing from your life. In some way, you're already connected to what is missing because there's no place that it's not. You share this. Right now my heart is being beaten, or is beating, by an energy, and it's beating everybody else's heart in this room as well, and it beats everybody else's on this planet as well. We share that energy. It's growing your fingernails. I used to say it's growing our hair, but I've lost faith in that one. Actually, it still grows it, it just grows it in other funny places. Now, here's what I think this is the meat of intention as I move off now into energy. You look at what it is that— when did you begin? You're a scientist, you look at what began you. And you go back and you say, well, there was a seed, there was a drop of human protoplasm that collided with another drop, a seed was formed, a tiny microscopic seed was formed and that's called your conception in a moment of your parents' amour, right? And that's where you began. But then you take that seed that began you at your conception and you put it to the microscopic test and you turn up the magnification and you see that in that seed that began you, there was something called a molecule. And if you take a molecular microscope and turn up the magnification, all you're doing is looking looking to find out where did the seed come from? How did this thing called you, which had in it your height, your weight, the color of your skin, when you were born, when you will die— it had everything that is physical about you was in that seed. It's a miracle. It's miraculous. It's gaga. We can't figure it out. A heart starts beating inside of a mother's womb. 6 weeks after that moment, it's a total mystery to everybody on the planet. We have no idea. But we do know that if you turn up the magnification and try to study where that seed came from, we see first molecules. Inside the molecules, we see atoms, another atomic microscope. Inside of the atoms, we see electrons, neutrons, protons, crutons, all of these things we memorized in grade school, right? We take the electron with an electron microscope trying to find out where did this seed that I first started with, where did it come from? What's its source? We take this electron microscope, we turn up the magnification, we study it at the quantum level, and we find out there are tiny little particles in there called quarks. And we take these quarks— mostly we have spaces— we take these quarks and we put them right here in this state into a particle accelerator, we rev them up at 250,000 1,000 miles per hour. We collide them. We open up the particle accelerator and we look inside and there's nothing there. There's no particles there. There's only energy. Pure energy. No particles. St. Paul told us about it 2,000 years ago before quantum physics was even thought of. That which is seen hath not come from that which doth appear. The source of everything, particles cannot create more particles. Dr. Hawking's lectures, I've sat through 3 of them in the last few, all substantiate this idea that out of, here's how it's quoted in the Bhagavad Gita. Here's the source speaking. I am the source of all spiritual and material worlds. Everything emanates from me. That's the voice of the creative divine. Divine organizing intelligence that we call God or soul or spirit. Now, this isn't even anything that you needed to know. The intriguing thing about it is that what you needed for this physical journey was not only in that seed that is physical and a particle, but when you look for its source, what you needed for this physical journey was in the energy that allowed the seed to come into emanation, into creation, into form in the first place. That your source for looking the way you look and showing up when you showed up was in something that has no boundaries. And more than that, what really intrigues me the most is that what you needed for this journey in an emotional sense, what your purpose is, is, every thought that you have, all of the emotional experiences of your life, all of your goals, all of your aspirations, all of your dreams, all of this stuff that emanates from this human thing that you're in, the ghost in the machine, all of that was in this energy that is formless before it came into a seed. So that the question to ask yourself about intention is, how did I get off of intention? How did I get off of what was in the energy that allowed me to become the seed that allowed me to become the being that I am? How come I'm not fulfilling a magnificent destiny? How come I'm not doing what Jesus said? Even the least among you can do all that I have done and even greater things. How come I'm not doing that? And I have the answer, but it's too good. You got to pay more.

I'm sorry, it's too good. Doreen, take up a collection here, will you?

This is too good. I want to just share this with you. The reason why you got off of what it is that your intent had for you in the energy before you even came into this physical world is that you moved out of harmony with that which created you. When you leave your source, you lose the power of your source. When you connect back to your source, that invisibleness from which everything emanates, you regain the power of your source. You could do anything. Intention is nothing more than moving into harmony with what it is that created you in the first place, and it's not physical, which we've just demonstrated. So if you had magic binoculars and you could take those binoculars out and you could look at intention, you could see it, you just get a picture of what it looks like. I believe that there are faces of intention. I've just written a chapter called The Seven Faces of Intention. I'm not going to go into all of them. I just want to share with you what I believe this organizing spirit called God, or soul, or spirit, this principle that allows something to go from formless to form, from boundaryless to boundary, from nowhere, N-O-W-H-E-R-E, to now here, N-O-W-H-E-R-E. Just the same, just a little difference in spacing. And you get into now here, and you look at now here, and you say, where is this thing thing going? It's going nowhere. Just watch it. It was— here's the way William Blake put it: to see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, to hold eternity in the palm of your hand and infinity in an hour, we are all led to believe a lie when we see with, not through, the eye which was born in a night to perish in a night. While the soul slept in beams of light. You were all born in a night to perish in a night. Everything on this planet was. But there is something that we have got missing. So if there is an organizing spirit— not if there is, there is— what does it look like? Here's what it looks like. I'm going to give you just 3. There's 7, maybe 1,000. The first is that it is creative. Somehow this force wants to create. If it didn't, it wouldn't. There would be no creation. When you leave creativity and creation ideas behind you and do what others tell you to do, you have detached yourself from Spirit, from the organizing intelligence. Every time you're not creative and following up what somebody else thinks you should do, you have left the rapport, the harmony that you need. You have left being what God is and turned yourself into something that some ego body has said you should be. You cannot manifest, attract into your life what you want, live at the highest levels of consciousness if you are not creative. Not creating, the spirit is all that creates. Secondly, all that is created has to be kind. If you could see God, if you could just see this spirit, you would see something that would— why would the creative force that brings anything into creation create something and then not want it to live and to survive and to be and to thrive and to be happy? And so why would it want to do that? It would just create something and say, "Ah, the hell with that. I don't want—" It doesn't do that. It is kind. You want to hear an amazing research study? They just discovered that when a person is a recipient of kindness, any act of kindness that you receive in your life, a simple act. I was watching Dr. Hawkins speak today and a woman, a pregnant woman came in there. I hope she was pregnant. I've made that mistake before. And she, there was no chairs left and there was a man sitting there. And he just got up and he walked to the back. He said, "Here, you take my chair." An act of kindness. Okay? Her serotonin levels were increased. You know what serotonin, the enzyme in the brain, that's what Prozac does, that's what Wellbutrin does, that's what Celexa does. All of these things that we call antidepressants, they just stimulate the growth of serotonin, an enzyme in the brain that makes you feel like you have peace of mind. All right? So that an act of kindness increases serotonin levels in the body, number one, and number two, it increases the strength of the immune system. If you are the recipient of an act of kindness and you feel that, which is what the creative spirit is, kind, it's always kind, then you will have your immune system, which is designed to help you to overcome disease processes, strengthened. Now, the giver of the act of kindness, the provider of the act, has his serotonin levels increased and has his immune system strengthened. So that in any act of kindness, the recipient and the provider, both of them have this physiological reaction that they've just measured. But the intriguing thing is that anybody who observes that, who is in the energy field to observe the act of kindness has their serotonin levels and their immune system strengthened, research-wise, at the same level as the two participants. The act of observing acts of kindness impact us physically. Who was the person— was there anybody here who wanted to— there was a couple of things you wanted to buy in the bookstore, but you were like $100 short and you couldn't do it and you didn't have the money and you— who was it? Was anybody like that? Was that you? Pardon? It was jewelry? How much were you short? $100? Come on up here. Come here. Come up here.

This is an order.

This is God speaking. All right? Can you walk? I know you don't want my money, but you're going to have to take it. Come over here. I brought this for you. This is an act of kindness. Are you going to allow me to do it? I want you to buy your jewelry with this today. That's for you. Okay? It's real.

What just happened? Serotonin.

How do you feel? How do you feel? She's throwing kisses. I feel the same way. Kundalini going up my back. And guess what? Everybody in the room has the same reaction. An act of kindness. The third of these qualities is— and there's others as well— the third is called beauty. All that is goes from the formless to the form, to the seed, is first of all has to be created. Secondly, it has to be put into a salubrious environment for it to survive. It wants to survive. And three, it is beautiful or attractive. Nothing is created— why would the creative spirit create something that it thought was unattractive, that it thought was useless, that it didn't think was beautiful? I have been I'm quoting a poem, 25 years. I wrote about it in Wisdom of the Ages. A young Victorian poet named John Keats, considered by many to be the greatest poet of an entire century, died at the age of 25. An ode to a Grecian urn. Truth. Truth is God. Truth is that from which everything emanates. Truth and God and intention are all synonyms. Beauty is truth.

There is something, um, that I refer to as a calling, and, um, it is something that's sort of buried deep inside of us. A few years back, I wrote a book for my teenage children. I had 5 of them as teenagers at one time, and the book's called 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace. And the reason I wrote this was that I wanted my children, after I'm gone, to if they ever wanted to know what I thought of as the most important ideas that I had ever encountered, I wanted to put them in this little collection here. And the second one of these secrets was something that you've probably heard me say if you've listened to me over the years or if you've watched public television. And it's called— it was— I got it from one of the great, great teachers that ever walked on this earth. His name was Leo Tolstoy. He was considered to be the father of Russia. In 1905, this was the most famous man on the planet. This was before television, before radio. He was one of the real great, great writers of our time, but he didn't just write great things like War and Peace. He wrote The Kingdom of Heaven is Within, a spiritual text for— and he was speaking from a position of having an awareness of the power of great spiritual teachers especially Jesus Christ, in a country that was run by czars and, um, didn't really have a whole lot of religious tolerance. And he wrote a little short story, 167 pages, so it's not that little, called The Death of Ivan Ilyich. And Ivan Ilyich was a judge who lived in Moscow, and he hated everything about his life. He blamed his wife for where he was, what his conditions of his life were. He had wanted to be something else in his life. And instead, because of the pressures that he felt were imposed upon him, he went to school and studied law and became a judge, went back and forth every day, but didn't like anything about his life. And if you remember the title of the story, you know the ending, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and you kind of keep waiting for that. And in the very last page, he is lying on his deathbed, and he looks up at his wife, who is holding his hand, and this is a woman he despised, and blamed for the conditions of his life, especially his inner conditions. And the last words he said to her as he died were, "What if my whole life has been wrong?" And he died. I was in the Navy at that time. I was 19 years old. I was on my way to Japan across the Pacific Ocean, and I took out a notepad and I wrote a little note to myself, and it said, "Dear Wayne, don't die with your music still still in you. I always go back to that as one of the signature moments in my life when I started a journal and started writing down the really powerful ideas. And I wrote about them and have practiced them and lived them. But there is something, something inside each and every one of us. In India, they call it a dharma. And a dharma is really a— there's a pull, there's a purpose to your life. And each and every one of us, all of us who originated from the same place and, uh, will return to the same place. T.S. Eliot said, uh, we shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place from which we came and to know it for the first time. He was talking about death. I'm talking about getting to that place without having to die, what we call dying while we're alive, dying to the ego, to the part of us that believes in this thing that we call— Muktananda called it the false self— the part of us that becomes aware that we are something other than what we really were intended to be and what we came here to do and what we showed up here for. The first 9 months of your life, from your conception until your birth, you were in a state of complete surrender. There was nothing to do. Everything was handled handled for you. Whatever it was that handled it, whether you call it God or spirit or the Tao or consciousness or divine mind, whatever it is, it does nothing and yet it leaves nothing undone. And there's this complete surrendering process. We have no other choice. We show up here from— in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that all being comes from non-being. Jesus put it the same way. He said it's the spirit that gives life. The flesh counts for nothing. Quantum physics teaches us one thing, if nothing else, for certain: that particles themselves do not come from particles. That there is something in each and every one of us that is formless, that is boundaryless, that has no beginnings, that has no ends. It's eternal. And it is from that that we emerged in some mysterious fashion, in one split second, from non-being to being. From non-particle to particle. And in that split second, everything that you needed for this physical journey was handled for you. And it's the biggest and most incredible miracle that any of us can ever witness, isn't it? And when you contemplate it and think about it, you try to process it, and it's just beyond anything that our meager intellect can handle. I was at the birth of 6 of those children, watched that miracle unfold, and saw that that these children not only were a great mystery, but they came here with personalities already intact the moment that they were born. And any of you mothers out there who've had more than one child know exactly what I'm speaking about. Some of them sleep through the night, some of them stick their tongue out at you the first second they see you, and then when they're 18 and they come home, they do the same damn thing, you know. And this incredible mystery, this place called spirit, is something that handles everything for us without doing anything. And the moment that we are born, this beautiful little baby comes out and we hold it after we take the mucus out and we cut the little cord and do all the little wiping off and hold this little baby and we look at it and we say, great work, God. Thank you. We'll take over from here. And that was the birth of your false self. This is the time when we take over and we begin to edge edge God out of the picture and take it over ourselves. Edge God out. E-G-O. We take on this thing called an ego, and it becomes our identification. And all of the great spiritual teachers, whoever they may be, teach us the same thing, that this is not the authentic self. This ego of ours, we begin to believe something that has nothing to do with spirit, that perfection from which we originated, which allowed us to become this perfect little creation. It's not too great a stretch for me to imply that if everything that we needed for this physical journey was handled in that moment of our going from non-being to being, that everything for the rest of the journey was in there as well. If we would have just let it be— there go the Beatles again— let it Let it be. There will come an answer. Let it be. But we don't. We start teaching ourselves and our children that who we are is not this divine, perfect creation that knows exactly what to do and what to be. It's already been taken care of. It's already been handled. Just like everything else on this planet has a dharma. Every spider, every otter, every flower. Nobody has to interfere with it. Nobody has to tell it what to be or how to do it. Do what it is. It just is. It just is. But we start interfering, and as we interfere, we take on this false self. And this false self says that who I am is what I have. So we begin to become obsessed by our possessions, and we train our children and ourselves to believe that who I am is what I possess and what I own. And as we take on this belief system that I am what I own, it becomes The very thing that takes us away from our spirit. Because the ego says you are what you have. The Tao says let go of everything you have. Just let it go. You don't need to own anything. And then we believe also that this false self of ours believes that we are what we do and what we accomplish. And so we spend a big hunk of our life preparing ourselves to achieve, to get ahead of the other guy, to get the good grades, to make more money, to be in competition, to evaluate our worth as human beings on the basis of how we stack up to others and how we achieve. The ego says you are what you do. In the Tao, it teaches us to do nothing, to do less, that more is less and less is more, and to allow yourself to be guided and to know that there's a divine organizing intelligence in this universe and you can let it. Lao Tzu put it this way. He said, let yourself be lived by it. Let yourself be lived by it. He said, you're doing nothing. You're just being done. Let yourself be done just like you did in the first 9 months. You're doing nothing. You're just being done. And at 68, when I look in the mirror, I can see the same thing happening. I'm just being done. Just try to stop your heart from beating or your fingernails from growing. I used to to say, or your hair from growing, but I've mastered that one. And then this false self of ours, this ego, tells us that not only are you what you have and what you do, but you are what other people think of you. You're your reputation. And again, we go off on this journey of attempting to get everybody that we encounter to accept the fact that if you like me, then I'm a better person. And so We struggle with things like peer approval and getting other people to like us and evaluating ourselves on the basis of how many awards we win and so on. And then this false self also tells us that we're separate from everybody else and that we're separate from what's missing in our life. And the most egregious error of this false self is that it teaches us that we are separate from God, that God is something external to ourselves. Ourselves, something that we, um, we pray to and we ask for divine guidance from. And we treat this thing that we call God like a cosmic bellboy, asking it for things when we get into trouble and promising to behave. It'll, it'll only deliver for us now, as if this God was a withholding God and had the power to heal you or to offer you the abundance that is missing in your life, but it's holding it back so that you'll contribute more to whatever organizations believe they represent God. And it's, again, it's a false image. And what happened for me at the age of 65, the day after I turned 65, 3 years ago, is that I was called to do something and live something that I had never even imagined could happen. On the 11th of May, 2005, I called my secretary, who was here with me today. She's been with me for 32 years. Her name is Maya. She's in the back. And, um, I called her and I said to her— and I don't know, I didn't know this the day before— I said, I would like you to take everything that I have in my townhouse, which was my office where I did all of my writing for the previous 25 years, which had over 20,000 books in there and, um, all kinds of equipment of all kinds and awards that were on the walls and photographs and furniture and electronic equipment and tax records and whatever you accumulate in a writing space over a quarter of a century. And I told her, as I handed her the key to this place, I said, I want you to get rid of it all. She said, well, tell me which part you want to save. And I said, I don't want to save anything. I want it all to be gone. And she said, and then when it's empty. What would you like me to do with this place? I said, we'll sell it or give it away. And, um, that night someone called about an inquiry about purchasing this place, which was near a hospital in Boca Raton, who needed to be close to a hospital because of an injury he had received. And he said he would really like to have one of these places, which were very, very hard to come by. And he made an offer And Maya said, well, it's about $50,000 less than what we can get for it. I said, let them have it. And then when you sell it, give the proceeds to my ex-wife. And I left with no clothes, no shoes. Everything that was in there was gone. And I was called to Maui where I live. And I was called by a man who lived 2,500 years ago in the warring states. Of China, part of that 93% of when we were still at war with each other. Villages fighting villages, countries fighting countries, people conquering each other, enslaving each other. And this man who lived at that time, his name was Lao Tzu, which in Chinese means old man, and asked me to, in my meditations that kept coming up over and over again, to immerse myself into this ancient book called the Tao Te Ching. T-A-O-T-E-C-H-I-N-G. Tao means the great way. T-E in ancient Chinese means the virtues of. Ching means book. So the Book of Living the Virtues of the Great Way, 81 verses. Some call it the wisest book ever written. It came down to us with over 14,000 different translations in the last 2,500 years. Modern, ancient, all the different languages, 14,000 different interpretations of this classic text that he jotted down. In fact, he didn't even write it. He dictated it to the gatekeeper as he got on his oxen, legend tells us. And he came to the gate where he said, I can no longer live amongst these warring states and these warring peoples. I am a man of peace. And the gatekeeper wouldn't let him leave, legend tells us. Unless he told him in words the great wisdom that he had been telling people who had been coming to him for many, many, many years, including a man named Confucius, who was 40 years his junior, who came to him for advice. He was a contemporary of Buddha, just a little ways away from there, and Socrates and Zoroaster and some of the greatest spiritual teachers who all walked among us in that 5th century before Christ. Someone sent me a book when I was working on this called Lao Tzu and Jesus, and on the left-hand side of the page were the teachings of Jesus, and on the right side were the teachings of Lao Tzu. And now I'm not saying that Jesus was copying or plagiarizing since he came 500 years later, but I know there's no time, so all of that is meaningless. But they're almost identical because the great spiritual teachers who've walked among us only have one message for us. And in these 81 verses, which you could read in about an hour, but you can study for a lifetime. I had a teacher in India back in the '80s. His name was Nisargadatta Maharaj. And Nisargadatta had a book written about him by his devotees, just like Lao Tzu did. It was called I Am That. And I remember him saying, to us that you don't have to read this book. He said, just carry it with you and the wisdom from the pages will come to you because there's energy in everything. You don't even have to look into it if you don't want to. And if you need to, you'll be guided to. And now that was a while back. I was in my early 40s and I just thought, well, this is just another one of those crazy gurus over there in India. And I didn't understand that until I became familiar with some of Hawkins' work on energy. So I created my own translation of the Tao from bringing them with me and going through the ones that seemed to be most relevant, the ones that were most understandable, and we put it into a paperback with an affirmation next to each one of them. And I now understand what he meant, and I do this now. I carry it with me wherever I go, the entire Tao, and it always guides me. The Tao has impeccable wisdom in it. The opening line of the Tao says, the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. The minute that you put a label on it, you have now divided it into two. You've got the thing and you've got what you're calling it. And, uh, when you try to make two-ness out of oneness, you've lost it. It just is what it is. It does nothing. God does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. And God and the Tao, in my estimation, assumation are synonymous. It is that which allows all things to come into being, which has no form. It is who you are right now, sitting here processing this in your bodies. But the part of you that's processing it has no body, has no form, has no beginning, has no end. And there you are, this huge paradox in a body that began and ends, is going to stop someday. All that materializes, dematerializes, And there's a part of you in there watching, listening, observing that has none of that. You're a walking, breathing paradox, like everything in the world of the 10,000 things, which is what Lao Tzu called the material world. And so I was called to it, and I decided that I was going to take an entire year of my life, and in this year I was not just going to write about the Tao, I was going to experience it. I was going to live it. Each of the 81 verses. And I called my publicist and my publisher and all of those people who schedule me and do things to me, direct me here and there, and told them that I was taking the year of 2006 to be essentially free of that. And there are 81 verses, and if you take 365 days and you divide it by 81, it comes up to about 4 and a half. So for 4 and a half days, I had the opportunity to explore experience, verse 1 of the Tao, what it meant, meditating on it, practicing it wherever I could go, living it, memorizing it, constantly referring to it, taking notes on it, talking about it, but more than anything, attempting to live it and to practice it. And this was a calling. This was a calling that said, Wayne, you have music to play. And just because you're 65 years old, or 66 then, doesn't mean anything because there is no time. And so, uh, when you read the Tao, Lao Tzu's great tome on eternal wisdom, so much of it is paradoxical. So much of it doesn't make sense to our intellect. So much of it we want to reject, particularly those of us, all of us in this room who live here in the West. This idea that, um, you can get more by doing less, that you can become strong by, by becoming weak. That you can become big by thinking small. And at the end of each one of those 4.5 days, when there would come a time when I wouldn't even know if I had it yet, then I would wake up at 3 o'clock or so in the morning and I would meditate on it. And on that half day that I had, I would write my interpretation, my essay about how to do the Tao now, how to live it. And we made a public television special Evan Carmichael about it. They allowed us to broadcast it all over the country in prime time. Imagine the calling. Imagine the power, the feeling of being able to make a huge impact in the world by having something written 2,500 years ago being broadcast on national television night after night after night in city after city after city, raising money for a wonderful cause like public television. An honor beyond anything I can describe to you. And every time it would air, I could see people being touched by it. We called it Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, and there's 81 essays in it. It's a little heavy to carry with you. When I finished that year and I finished that book and I did the public television special and I lived those 81 verses, what I realized is that it taught me what to think. I learned what to think. I learned— see, what Tao teaches us is that we all have a nature. Listen to Lao Tzu. He says, every human being has an essential nature that is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world, we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature. I would suggest that all of us who have immersed ourselves in this world have taken on a counterfeit nature. What I just described in the opening few moments. This ego, this part of us that really believes that my essence and my nature is about what I have, what I do, what other people think of me, and my separation from each other and from God. That's the story of the ego. This counterfeit nature, if we can transcend it— what I learned to think was, he said, look at nature, you'll find God in nature. So in the 81 verses of the Tao, 31 of those verses contain references to water, to just be like water. And what is water like? It is the softest substance on the planet, and yet it is the strongest. If you take a rock, the hardest substance you can find, you can take titanium and just take a lump of it there and just let water run over it patiently continually running over it, eventually whatever that hard thing is, it will disappear. And water, if you want to get a hold of it, if you want to experience water, if you reach in and grab a handful of it, and the tighter you squeeze, the less you get. But if you let go and relax and allow and do nothing, you'll understand water. And if you look at the sea, the sea is the lowest— we call it sea level, and it is the lowest place on the planet. And all of the rivers and all of the streams, wherever you see it, they're all competing and fight, whatever they're doing, but the sea stays low. And in so doing, it allows all of this to come to it. Practice, the Tao says, radical humility. Stay low. Let your ego go. Let it come to you. And miracles can happen for you. In the Tao, it says that, uh, A journey of 1,000 miles begins with what? A single step. It says don't think big. Great sages, says the Tao, accomplish great things by thinking small. I just celebrated my 22nd year of sobriety, and I want to tell you, that's big, especially if you had 22 years before that in which you drank every day. Not to drunkenness, just every day. And when the day came, when the time came, when the quantum moment came for for me to let it go, I didn't do it by thinking big and saying, I'm gonna not drink now for the next 22 years. I would have had to open a beer to contemplate that. But I accomplished great thing like that by thinking small. And so I learned what to think. And then that year was complete, and I studied it and wrote about it and felt its presence. It excited me. This thing called the Tao. And I had written, I taught at a university for years. I even taught courses in various different philosophies and taught about the Tao, but I'd never understood the symmetry, the beauty, how compelling the simplicity of this great wisdom. If you begin to apply it, if you begin to see and find your own essential nature, and your own essential nature is just like all of other nature. You're a part part of nature. And yet what we have done is ignored our nature so frequently. Our nature has nothing to do with violence. It has nothing to do with weapons. It has nothing to do with killing. It has nothing to do with enemies. These are all constructs of the ego, of the false self. We come from a place of perfection, a place of kindness, a place of love, creation. Learn to think like God thinks. That's what Einstein said when they asked him about quantum physics, they said his observation was, he said, I, he said to me, he said that they're just details. He said all I want to do is learn to think like God thinks. How does the source from which all things originate, to which all things return, how does it think? How does it act? That's what Lao Tzu meant when he said we have an essential nature, and these virtues inside of the, of our essential nature are nothing more. There's four of them. They're nothing more than reverence for all of life. If you can live that reverence for all of life, sincerity, which manifests itself as honesty, just simple honesty, not that you don't steal, but the kind of honesty in which you are able to relate to and reflect who you are with everyone that you meet from a place of internal integrity, that this is who I am. This is how I dress. This is how I live. This is what I think. Gentleness is the third of these virtues in the T.E. in the Tao Te Ching. Simple gentleness which manifests itself as kindness. And finally, service, which is nothing more than just reaching out and serving others. And in the unknown teachings of Lao Tzu called the Hua Hu Ching, I'm going to read something to you that is one of the most impactful things that I've ever heard in my life. And I'd like you to really think about it big time. Many of you know about something that raged across the country a year or so ago called The Secret. And it had some great lessons in it about the power of our thoughts to align with the thoughts of God, and in doing so, to be able to manifest and attract into our lives what we would like. And I was asked to be a part of that, and I turned it down because I think they missed something. They missed what I'm about to share with you. In fact, yesterday, yesterday for the very first time, I was able to preview something that I undertook this summer at the age of 68. When I was asked if I would do a film, a movie, a movie for movie theaters, not a talking heads movie, not a movie which I'm just interviewed and talking like I'm doing now, but an actual film with with real people in it, 92 of them to be exact, starring Portia de Rossi, who is Ellen DeGeneres' spouse. And I had the great honor on the 16th of August this year when they both asked me in their quiet, cutest way you've ever seen at Ellen's home if I would marry them, and I did. We were in the midst of filming this movie called Ambition to Meaning. I saw it yesterday, the first rough cut for the whole thing and watched it with Maya in my room here at the hotel. And Maya was sobbing and couldn't contain her enthusiasm. It just, it absolutely blew me away. You'll be able to see it in January. It's a little over 2 hours and it's a drama. And it takes what I think was missing from The Secret and puts it into 3 concurrent running stories and teaches people that this idea of aligning ourselves with our spirit, with God, is not about what's in it for us. It's not about saying, 'I want this,' or, 'I want that.' And it's not about selfishness, and it's not about attracting into your life more of the stuff of the ego. It's about something very different. And this is how Lao Tzu put it in the oral teachings of the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching: If you wish to become a divine immortal angel, then restore the angelic qualities of your being through virtue and service. This is the only way to gain the attention of the immortals who teach the methods of energy enhancement and integration that are necessary to reach the divine realm. If you want to reach the divine realm, if you want to know God, not about God, if you want to experience experience the opportunity to think like the Source, like the Tao, like God thinks, and have all that is possible to come into your life come into it, then listen on. These angelic teachers, this energy, this spiritual force, this guidance, these angels, whatever you want to call that guidance that comes to us from beyond, These angelic teachers that you seek out cannot be sought out. It is they who seek out the students. Do I ever know that to be true, especially after giving up everything that I owned, everything, and letting it all go and immersing myself for a year of my life in this process. When you succeed in connecting your energy with the divine realm, Through high awareness and the practice of undiscriminating virtue, the transmission of the ultimate subtle truths will follow. This is the path that all angels take to the divine realm. This is the path. The mystical techniques for achieving immortality, that is, the ability to manifest and attract into your life at any moment anything at all that you would desire are revealed only to those who have dissolved all ties to the gross worldly realm of duality, conflict, and dogma. You have to dissolve your ties to this false self and the world that perpetuates it. As long as your shallow worldly ambitions exist the door will not open. And that's what I think The Secret missed. And that's what we tried to do in Ambition to Meaning. It's to get to that TE in the Tao Te Ching, to get to that place where you live and practice the virtues that I just described: reverence for all of life, just simple, never ever, not only not killing other things, including animals, and even plants and each other, but in not even judging each other. Patanjali, another great teacher from India 3 centuries before Christ, said that when you are steadfast— steadfast means you never slip— when you are steadfast in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed towards yourself and others, that all living creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence. Such was the nature of St. Francis, of Jesus of Nazareth, of Lao Tzu, of Buddha. You are steadfast, you never slip in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed towards yourself and others, that all living creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence. There are people who, when they are in the presence of wild animals, they become tame. Babies stop crying. You see a person like that walk into the room and the energy of the room changes and you feel comfortable and you feel safe and you get a kundalini running up and down your back of just like having a warm shower running inside of you. Such is the nature of these people and such is the nature of the source from which you originated and to which you will return. In A Course in Miracles, there's a line that Jesus says— for those who believe that it was Jesus, and many do, whoever it was— Jesus says, if you want to be like me, knowing that we are alike, I will help you. If you want to be different than me, I will wait until you change your mind. And you will change your mind. You may have to die to do it, But you will change your mind because that's the place from which we originated that T.S. Eliot spoke about, where you'll come to know it for the first time. When you live those simple virtues of reverence for all of life, never judging others, natural sincerity, just a simple honesty, this is who I am, gentleness, which is just always extending kindness and service, it's dissolving your ties to the gross worldly realm, just letting go of that. And one of the best ways to do it is to want less, to expect nothing for yourself, and anything that does come to you, to just let it flow, to give it away. And the more of that that you do, the more you act like God acts. The great poet Hafiz, the Persian poet from the 13th century, said, even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.' Just think what a love like that can do. It lights up the whole world. And there's such a mystery in that that we attempted to convey in this film. And I'm still so taken by the, the incredible acting job and the directors and all of the people who participated in this, in this project of creating a film, a movie, an opportunity for people to finally see that it is through these virtues that the doors begin to open into your life and abundance. I'm telling you, I would urge you to not pay attention to all of the stuff on CNBC, which is all of the financial disaster possibilities, and checking your stock market and checking your 401(k)s and check— and listening to the horror stories of all of the things that and the collapse, the imminent collapse of our entire— you don't need any of this. Where do you think you're going? You came from nowhere. N-O-W-H-E-R-E. That's where you came from, nowhere. Where do you think you're headed? You went from nowhere to now here in a split second, and it's the same thing. N-O-W-H-E-R-E. It's just a little question of spacing. Nowhere, now here. Here we are in now here. Where do you think your next step is? Nowhere. You don't need a 401(k). You don't need to be consumed with all of this stuff about money. This is, you know, when we did this thing on ambition to meaning, I had a real sense as I listened to the results of the election that we can, as a people, we can also move from ambition to meaning. As a people, not just in our own lives. Because in the, in the morning of our lives, you know, there's a, a line from, uh, Carl Jung in The Stages of Life, which is really what we opened this film with. He says, thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that the truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we said, he said, we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning. For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. If you try to run the time of your life when you are in the phase of meaning rather than ambition, based upon the program of what you were taught in the morning about ambition and about ego, you're going to be living a lie. So Jung, I mean, he speaks to us. Let me read it to you again in the light here. Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Unprepared into the afternoon of life is the time in your life when you shift from ambition and ego development to meaning. Worse still, he said, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas that we learned in the morning will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. If you're trying to find meaning and purpose and fulfillment and joy and peace and happiness in the afternoon of your life, if you're trying to have that and to have that for other people and to want for others even more than you want it for yourself. You can't do that according to the program of the ego. You can't do that. The door will not open as long as you're connected to that. The doors begin to open as you lose your identity with this false self, as you let it go. As they say in the recovery movement, as we let go and we— real loud— what? Let God. As we let go and let God, which is what you did in the first 9 months. You were on your way, and then we edged God out. So now we get to the afternoon of our life, and as I learned, I learned what to think. But you know what? I had another calling last year, and I just spent up until about 2 and a half weeks ago writing every single day from the 1st of February in a new book that'll be out next April or May. It's called Excuses be gone. And excuses are really the explanations that we have for why our life isn't working the way we want it to work. There are explanations. Again, I'm going back to we want to learn to think like God thinks, and God needs no excuses for anything. So what the Tao taught me, and what change your thoughts, change your life— what it taught me was what to think. But over and over again, I kept hearing, especially after doing the PBS tours and so on, the idea that I know what to think. I know how to think soft. I know how to think kindness. I know how to think peace. What I don't know how to do is to change around the patterns that I have for thinking the way that I've been thinking for an entire lifetime. That here I am now in my 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s, whatever it might be. And I have a lifetime of thinking a certain way, and if I could overcome that and learn to change that— how to change lifetime thinking habits. Habits rule the unreflecting herd, said William Wordsworth. Habits rule the unreflecting herd. Habitual thinking, a way of thinking that keeps me trapped in— even if I know what to think, I don't know how to stop this incessant, habitual way of looking at my world from a position of shortages, from a position of lack. And so I listened again and had another calling, and I read 3 books. I'm going to just briefly share them with you. One of them was a book called The Biology of Belief and, um, Unleashing the Power of Consciousness. It's by a man named Bruce Lipton, PhD. This book was a life changer for me because here's what it taught me. It taught me that the biggest excuse that we have for why we are the way we are is this thing called our DNA. Like, I mean, you see people interviewed on TV and, um, they'll say, well, you know, I can change my habits and I can change this and all that, but I sure as hell can't change my DNA. And then someone will say, well, that's absolutely right. And, uh, you know, and you'll hear people agreeing with with that. And it's pretty much a, a system of thinking in which we say that our bodies and these little particles that are deep inside our DNA structures are given to us, they're handed to us at the moment of our conception, they're not changeable. And I can't help it. I mean, that's why I reached over and grabbed you where I shouldn't have. It wasn't me, it was my hand. And this hand of mine, it doesn't know. It just went for your breast and I didn't mean to. I mean, it was just, you know, it's in my DNA. You can't blame me for my hand doing these kinds of things. And we use this kind of stuff over and over again. All right? So what I learned from Bruce, he's got one little study. Let me just share it with you. I'm sure I brought it. This is just one little study that I picked out and I copied it to read to you this morning. It's a Baylor School of Medicine study published in 2002 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The lead author of the study, Dr. Bruce Moseley, knew that knee surgery— now knee, simple thing like knee surgery— helped his patients, and that all good surgeons know that there's no placebo effect in surgery. I mean, how can there be a placebo effect in surgery, right? But Moseley was trying to figure out which part of the surgery was giving his patients relief. The patients in this study were divided into 3 groups. Moseley shaved the damaged cartilage in the knee of one group. For another group, he flushed out the knee joint, removing material thought to be causing the inflammatory effect. Both of these constitute standard treatments for arthritic knees. The third group got fake surgery. I can't wait to go to this guy for a diagnosis. So the patient was sedated. Moseley made three standard incisions and then talked and acted just as he would have during a real surgery. He even splashed salt water to simulate the sound of the knee washing procedure. After 40 minutes, Moseley sewed up the incisions as if he had done the surgery. All 3 groups were prescribed the same post-operative care, which included an exercise program. The results were shocking. Yes, the groups who received surgery, as expected, improved, but the placebo group improved just as much as the other two groups. Despite the fact that there are 650,000 surgeries yearly for arthritic knees at a cost of about $5,000— this is a little old, probably more like $15,000— the results were clear to Moseley. My skill as a surgeon had no benefit on these patients. The entire benefit of the surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee was the placebo effect. Television news programs graphically illustrated the stunning results. Footage showed members of the placebo group walking and playing basketball, in short, doing things they reported they could not do before their quote-unquote surgery. The placebo patients didn't find out for 2 years that they had gotten fake surgery. One member of the placebo group, Tim Perez, who had to walk with a cane before the surgery, is now able to play basketball with his grandchildren. He summed up the theme of this book when he told the Discovery Health Channel, "In this world, anything is possible when you put your mind to it. I know that your mind can do miracles." That's from The Biology of Belief. And it's just— now Bruce taught at medical schools for almost 20 years. And finally told me that he had to leave because he realized that what he was teaching potential doctors about what it is that constitutes your ability to heal yourself is not located in something called particles, but it's located in something called spirit. In the invisibleness within us that we have the capacity to overcome even such things. And if you hear Bruce and read his book, which I recommend you do, you'll discover that there is something called the internal environment and the way that we process events through our conscious and our subconscious minds that can in fact alter and shift. Now, what this did for me is it gave me something called hope. It gave me something internally that says, if I get congestion in my chest, if I get heart palpitations, if I get a sore knee, if whatever it is that I can begin— and this is what Excuses Be Gone is about— you can begin to think in terms of awareness. Thinking with awareness. What is thinking with awareness? Awareness thinking and ego are not compatible. They cannot exist or coexist together. Awareness thinking is when you think from your highest self, from the place that you originated from, from the God within you. When you begin to think like God thinks— one of the words that Jesus said in the New Testament was, with God, all things are possible. Now, what does that leave out? What does all things are possible leave out? Nothing. Nothing. It leaves out nothing. When you begin to think from this level up here, the level of God consciousness, consciousness, the level of spirit, the level of the Tao, whatever it is that comes into your life. When you begin to think in terms of not only aligning yourself with this kind of thinking, that all things are possible, and you just change that habit, the habit of I've got an excuse, a built-in excuse, and the built-in excuse is it's my biology, I just simply can't help my biology. But your biology comes from your beliefs, just as much as it comes from your inheritance. And knowing that you can change it. That was the first book. The second book that I read before I wrote this book, which was given to me by my friend Tiffany on Maui. She brought it over one day and just said, I think you'll read it. It's about something called memes. I don't know what they are, but I know you'll like it because you like shit like that. Those were her words. I would never say that, but those were her words. So I just looked at it called Virus of the Mind by Richard Brody. Another life-changing book. We have them here. It's, uh, basically what Virus of the Mind says. It tells us what viruses are. So if you think about a virus, a virus has 3 purposes. The first purpose of a virus in your body and in your computer, for example, is to duplicate itself as much as it possibly can. Just to duplicate. It makes a copy of itself over and over and over again. It doesn't care who it does it it to. It doesn't have any vision about whether it's right or wrong, should or shouldn't be happening. It is just something that you get a virus, you know that you, you know, especially if you get one in your computer, you know you got a problem because it's just going to make a copy, then another copy, then another, and it just keeps doing that. That's how viruses work. Same thing in your body. And you can give it antibiotics all day and all night, and it just gobbles them up and says, great, good food for making more of myself. 'Cause that's what it will do. You know that you don't take an antibiotic when you have a virus. Alright? You have to outgrow it or get your immune system or whatever, but you can't just make it go away with medicine. The second thing a virus does is not only does it duplicate itself, but it infiltrates. That's its second purpose. It infiltrates wherever it can go. So any opening that it has, choo! In it goes. So it's in your ear, it looks over at your eyes, oh, good place for it, oh, it's over here. And if the thing gets out of control, it'll just take away your body, and it'll certainly take away your computer, won't it? It'll infiltrate. And the third purpose of a virus, not only does it duplicate and infiltrate, but the third purpose of a virus is to spread. Let me get into another computer. There's another body I can get into. And off this thing goes, making copies of itself, infiltrating going wherever it can go and spreading wherever it can go. Viruses of the mind work exactly the same way, except that there are no little tiny infinitely small particles, little viral particles. There's nothing there. There's no thing there. Viruses of the mind come from ideas. And a virus of the mind is an idea that has been placed into your mind from another mind. And its purpose is to do exactly what I just described: to duplicate, to infiltrate, and to spread. And you are filled with these viruses of the mind. There are umpteen of them, alright? And they're all called excuses. And these excuses are beliefs that you have had handed to you from well-meaning people who said, "We'll take over from here." off you go believing that certain kinds of things that happen in your world are happening because there's nothing you can do about it, because this is your truth. And these— the basic building block of genetics is called a gene. The building block of memetics— memetics, which comes from the word mimic, which means to copy, to notice what somebody else is doing and doing it. Is called a meme, M-E-M-E, and this is the science of the meme. This book was another life-changing kind of— and it really gave me the impetus, the idea to write about not just what to think, but how to change these lifelong thinking habits. So I'd like all of you in this room to think for a moment about something about yourself, whether you've been overweight for your entire lifetime, whether you've struggled with addictions of one kind or another for a lifetime, and you've tried all of the different kinds of things that you come up with, and still you find yourself struggling with, I can't, I just can't overcome it, I just can't change it, I've been this way, it doesn't work. And what I have done is I have created— I didn't even do it, I'm telling you, this was Lao Tzu at work in my life because I was doing my radio show that I do every Monday on hayhouseradio.com, and people call in from all over the world. And someone called in and said that she had channeled, because of what I had written about in Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, she had channeled a drawing of Lao Tzu. We don't even have any pictures of Lao Tzu. We just have people imagining what Lao Tzu must have looked like. And she drew this, she had this beautiful drawing, and she sent it to me. And And as soon as I opened it up, I said, "Oh my God." It spoke to me. It sits there in my writing space and I look at it, and every time I do and then I get quiet, it's like whatever I need, just, I put my hand out. See, I don't use computers. I write everything by hand. And I just put my arm on the table and it just starts coming through me. I call it automatic writing. It's when you really let go and let God. Really understand that even the speech that I'm giving right now and these words that are coming from someplace, I have no idea where, into me and through and into this little instrument I'm hearing and coming out to you, I don't own any of this stuff. I just let it come. I just trust in it and I know that if I stay true to those four virtues and just live from that perspective, that whatever I need will be there. So I don't get to own any of it. And I feel that way and I felt that way particularly as I was writing Excuses Be Gone. And it was Lao Tzu and that great teaching that was coming to me that basically said, I will give you a paradigm for change to help people to overcome a lifetime of thinking habits. Now, these memes that were placed into your mind— I wrote out 18 of them— they, uh, if you're thinking about changing something about yourself, anything at all, even the fact that you haven't been able to manifest prosperity or the right kind of relationships, or, you know, overcome illnesses, or not do some athletic event, whatever it might be, something that you have been unable to do. These are the memes. And then at the end, I'm going to go through this paradigm for you very quickly. I have seen— I just did a workshop in Maui for about 500 people from all over the world last weekend, or the weekend before, with my friend Ramana Maharshi. Ram Dass. By the way, he could definitely use your prayers tonight. He, after the seminar, he fell out of his wheelchair and cracked his hip and had to have a hip replacement. And when I was with him at the hospital on Sunday before I came here, he still wasn't able to breathe on his own, but it looked better when I've talked to him on the phone or I talked to his— so if you loved Ram Dass as I do, your deepest prayers would be much appreciated. At any rate, The year before, I started just thinking about this paradigm, and we had a woman there, her name was Suzanne, and she's from Toronto, actually from London, Ontario. She had binged and purged for 22 years without missing a day. She looked like death walking. Hollow eyes, sallow skin, sadness, a shaking, a quivering whenever she would— brilliant, very intelligent woman. Binging and purging every day for 22 years. And we ran her through the paradigm in 40 minutes in front of 600 people. And when we were there on October 27th, she celebrated her 1-year anniversary of not binging and purging. She did it in 40 minutes. That's how powerful what I'm talking about is. Any excuses be gone. And here are a few of these excuses that we use, none of which measure up and hold any truth. It will be difficult if I want to change. That's a meme. The idea that that if you've had a habituated way of thinking and being and behaving, and if you've had it for a lifetime, one of the things that you'll hear people say, they say it all the time, is it's going to be difficult to change that. Second one is that it will be risky. A third is that it will take a long time for me to change. That there will be family drama. These are all memes. That I don't deserve it. That it's not my nature. That I I can't afford it, that no one will help me, that it's never happened before, that I'm not strong enough, that I'm not smart enough, that I'm too old or I'm too young. I thought of that one when they asked me to do a film, which meant giving up a month of my life and doing 14 and 16-hour days from 7 in the morning till 9, 10 at night, sometimes staying up all night filming and refilming and refilming and refilming. And you don't just do a, uh, you know, to get 1 minute on the screen might take 4 hours easily. And to put myself through that and to take direction and to be told what to say and how to say it and where to stand and what the shadows are and to just give it all up and just surrender to it and say, I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to take on something I've never done before and just let it happen in the name of creating something that can transform the world. Are you willing? And I said, yes. And I remember how I surrendered as we went to— we filmed out in a place called Asilomar, just south of Monterey, California, for an entire month. It's like to let go of the meme that I'm too old to do something like that, that I can't change, that it's not something that I could do. You just let go of those. That the rules won't let me, that it's too big, that I don't have the energy, that my family history won't allow it, that I'm too busy, that I'm scared. All of these and many, many, many more All of these are none of the things that God does. The Tao needs no excuses, does it? God needs no excuses whatsoever. It's just being, just constant. You want to be that way. You want to let go of every one of these memes that have been handed to you by well-meaning people that are invisible ideas that were placed into your head that have duplicated so frequently and have infiltrated so much that in your schools and in your culture and in your religious training and so on, you begin to adopt these things and they become your truths when in fact they don't hold up to that at all, as you'll see when I run you quickly through the paradigm at the end of my time here with you this morning. The third book that I read before writing Excuses Be Gone was written by Sharon Begley. We don't have it here. It's called Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. She is the science writer for Newsweek magazine, and she spent about 10 years with the Dalai Lama, who brought the top neuroscientists from all over the world to his place in Lhasa, over India and Tibet, all the places that he brought these great teachers, and would have them all come together and look at the most recent literature that was being done in the field of neurology about what could be done with the brain. For those of you, any of any of you who are experiencing or have people in your family who are experiencing any kind of depression, I would really recommend you take a real hard look at some of the, the research that is being done. That the very fact that your brain, this physical thing that is inside of your head someplace, that we believe is the source of depressing thoughts that we have, that if you understand that it isn't necessary to be taking medicine all the time to rearrange the circuitry of your brain, which is what these antidepressant medicines really do. They really stimulate the formation of serotonin, which is the feel-good enzyme in the brain, isn't it? It's like the more serotonin we have, the better that we feel. And what they're discovering is that when they train people to think about how they think. In other words, very often a person who suffers from depression of any kind, and it doesn't have to be clinical depression, it can be depressing thoughts that you have at any moment, like, you know, you dropped a vitamin on the floor, and like that happened to me the other day, and it just frigging disappeared. It was just, it's just gone. It just disappeared. And I was on the floor looking down with my eyes this way, that way under, pulling the carpet up, and it's just gone. That's depressing. I mean, where the hell— how could it just— it just went from here to there. I still haven't found that vitamin. It's just like, it's just gone. So I mean, just a simple little thing like that. Or, you know, the moments in your life when you just, you know, you just lose it. You know, it's something that I guess I learned when I was a little boy, but it's that time. And then here you are, a 60-year-old man, and you still find yourself when something is very frustrating, you can't find something, you misplaced it or whatever, and it's just, ah, you just lose it, you know. And I know you think that something like that couldn't happen. I don't usually do that around other people, get me, but all alone in my room and there's nobody there, there's nothing like, uh, just letting one of those out. I can't take it, where is it? And then you come back and you remind yourself that you're a spiritual master and that you're a prophet and— or if it's clinical depression or whatever it is, that when instead of thinking— what we're doing now with patients who have this, instead of saying, okay, here's a Zoloft, here's some kind of a drug that we're going to give you and we're going to rearrange the synapses of your brain so that it works differently, and most of the time we don't even know What's going on inside the brain when we dispense these? You know, the field of psychiatry has basically become a drug peddling field. It really has. Almost people go now to psychiatrists, psychiatric treatment, basically to get some kind of a drug to take so that their life will get better. All of the things that we were so consumed with, you know, that the Dalai Lama said in there, he said, if we could take every child in the world, every child in the world, at the age of 5, and have them meditate on compassion for 1 hour a week, we could eliminate all violence and depression on this planet in 1 generation. Can you imagine? 1 generation, just thinking compassion, thinking about others. And one of the things that they taught in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, which has a lot of, you know, it's a little tougher read than what I've been talking I'm talking to you about, but it's, um, the scientific evidence in there is so clear that when a person is about to be depressed and they do an MRI and they'll, they'll look at the brain and they'll see the chemistry of the brain, there'll be a picture of it. Then they train them to thinking of a moment in their life when they felt loved, just like kinesiology, a moment in your life when you knew that you were as happy as you could be, and you train that person person to just move them and say to themselves, instead of saying, okay, here comes my depression and it's going to get worse, instead of that, saying instead, there goes my brain misfiring again and I am going to not be a part of it. I'm going to step outside, I'm going to watch it, and as I watch it, I am going to think a thought of a moment in my life when I felt good, I felt loved, I felt I felt happy. And then they train the person to put their thoughts on that, and then they do the MRI again and they look at it. And now you got a side-by-side view of the brain, and the brain has changed. The chemistry of the brain literally changes when you— you know, I said it in Power of Intention, I said it in all of my talks— when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. The world becomes a different world when you change the way you look at it. If you believe you live in a depressing world, you'll be looking for something to verify and validate that for yourself. When you change the way you look at this world, you live in a different world. So I would recommend you look at that. Now, in the last 10 minutes or so, I'd like to go through this paradigm rather quickly because of, you know, it's, uh, each one of these questions is a chapter in Excuses Be Gone, and that's the third part. The first part talks about Bruce's book and talks about the three books that I've mentioned— Virus of the Mind, Change Your Brain— and then the middle part of the book really looks at, um, the principles that are involved: thinking with awareness, thinking in terms of alignment, thinking passion, thinking compassion. And then this paradigm, which was given to me by my ancient spiritual friend, who I can still see walking off out of the villages where they were— everybody was going to continue the warring states— to live in peace in his final days, Lao Tzu. So the first of these questions is the most important. The question is, is it true? And as you listen to this paradigm, I'd like you to just really be thinking about not just yourself yourself and the people in your immediate family, but think about our children. It's why when I was being introduced, she talked about the, of the children's books. You can teach children these principles. So the first question, let's take the excuse, it's going to take a long time, it's going to be difficult, because that's the one, particularly for those of you who have suffered with physical maladies, who have suffered with being overweight, who suffered with not having enough prosperity into your life. I'd like you to just think about the question, is it true? Is the thought that it's going to be difficult to change true? And I'd like to work with someone to do that, but because of time constraints, I can't. So the question of, is it true? The fact is that you think approximately, they say, for those who engage in these accounting practices, about 60,000 thoughts, separate thoughts, every single day. The The problem with it is that you're going to think the same 60,000 thoughts today that you did yesterday and again tomorrow. And the real problem with this is about 59,950 of them are not true. They're just memes. They're things, they're viruses that have been planted into your mind to believe that it's going to be difficult. If you think that it's going to be difficult to change and you're really convinced of that, I put you through this in the paradigm and in the therapy, which is can you be 100% certain that it's going to be difficult and it's going to take a long time and there's going to be family drama if you were to do what you want to do? Can you be 100% certain that those things are true? The answer to that is no. You can never be 100% certain. So now you have a potential thought that something is going to be difficult, and if you know that it may or may not be true, even if you're you're absolutely convinced that it's 100% true, but then you start thinking about— you say, well, I can never be sure 100% that it's going to be true. Then you say to yourself, I have the option to think a thought which may or may not be true. The first thought, if I think it's going to be difficult, is going to lead me away from where I would like to be. The second thought, which also may or may not be true, is going to lead me to where I want to be. Which one of those thoughts, which may or may not be true, would you elect to take? This is what I was taught by Lao Tzu, that if you have a choice to think a thought that may or may not be true, why not pick the one that will lead you to where you would want to be? So what is the reverse thought of it's going to be difficult? It's going to be easy, or it's not going to be difficult. Okay, so now you have that choice and you begin to take that thought. I'm too old. It may or may not be true. I'm too young. It may or— I'm not smart enough. It may— now you begin to work this paradigm this way, that every time you have a thought about something which constitutes an excuse, which is nothing more than a meme, then you begin to reverse it and you begin to make the shift. And as you make that shift, you start thinking thoughts that may or may not be true, but always will lead you closer to where you want to be. So that's the first question: is it true? The second question is— and again, remember, each of these are a chapter, and I spent a month on each one of these— where did it come from? Where did the thought that I can't make something happen, I can't create prosperity, I can't create health in my life— where did that thought come Where did it come from? The answer to this question, the short answer to this question is it came from me. It came from myself. I chose it. It was the way, even though I was a child and it was handed to me and it was imposed upon me, there were other children around me who had the same kinds of things imposed upon them and they didn't buy into the same excuse that I'm buying into. You take responsibility. Responsibility for everything. Someone asked me in the back, what about if you have cancer? What about if you have something that, that has come to you and you can't overcome that? Do I take responsibility for that? The answer to that is yes. It's not about blame. It's not about karmic paybacks. It's about saying, I have been a vibrational match to what I have attracted into my life. I'm not guilty for it. I didn't do anything wrong, but it is mine because the reason As I told the gentleman, the reason that you do that is because if something outside of you is responsible for anything going on inside of you, you have to wait for something outside of you to shift and change. Whereas if you take responsibility and begin to say, "I'm choosing this. I've elected this," then you have an opportunity to make it go away, and otherwise you don't. Blame is a guarantee that the excuse will prevail. Okay? And all excuses, no matter what they are, are misalignments. They're all misalignments. That is, you are not aligned with God. God needs no excuses. Third question is, what are the payoffs? Why would I continue to think thoughts that don't work for me and contribute to my having excuses? The payoffs basically are avoidance. It's easier. It's the, the way that I can manipulate other people, you begin to look through the psychological support system for all of it. And now comes the guts of all of this, of this paradigm. And if you want to know more about this, you'll— my friend Byron Katie, one of the great teachers on the planet, one of my closest friends. I spoke to her last night, and, um, her stuff with the work— she has worked with me and been specifically instrumental in helping me to overcome some very difficult things in my own life. She is someone that I have never heard anything ever come out of her mouth other than love. She's one of the kindest spiritual saints walking this planet today, and, uh, if you get a chance to hear her, I urge you to do so. She does something called the work, and one of the questions that I learned from her in this paradigm is, what would my life look like if I couldn't think the thought that it's going to be difficult. And when I asked Suzanne, who was going through her first day of not binging and purging, what would your life look like if you couldn't think that this was going to take a long time, if you couldn't think it was going to be difficult, if you couldn't think that you didn't have the ability to change? What if you couldn't think that thought without that excuse? Everybody always says, if I couldn't think it I would feel free. I would be free. And that's the freedom that comes to it. The fifth question is, can I create a rational reason to change? My son Sam, who's 21 years old, has a habit, a bad one according to him. He can't get up in the morning. He sleeps till noon, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock every day. He can't get over it. He said, Dad, I just can't. I'm just too damn tired. I mean, I just— my eyes, I just can't get up and I can't go And I go to bed, it doesn't matter what time I go to bed, I have to sleep. So for his 21st birthday, we gave him a trip to Indonesia. Now, he loves to surf. He wakes up, breathes surfing. He's been living on Maui, you know, every summer since he was born. At 4 years of age, I gave him a surfboard and he went out and paddled out and rode it all the way in at the age of 4. He breathes surfing. He has surfing magazines. He gets up up, you know, and does his surf. So for going to Indonesia, he went down to Indonesia, he went on a boat for 10 days to get the best surf that you can find. And they have all these machines and they find out where the waves are. And he's up, he's up every morning at 5 o'clock, 5 o'clock, and he surfs all day. They go to these waves, they go to that island, they're doing all of these things. And then comes back, gets back at 10 o'clock at at night, sleeps for a couple of— up at 4 the next morning because they've got to— never complains during the whole time because he had a rational reason to change. When I was in junior high school, I was in love with Earlene, and she boarded the bus a block away from me, and I found out that she boarded the bus at 7 o'clock every morning, and I couldn't get up either until I found out that Earlene was getting on the bus stop at 7 AM. I was up at 6, getting ready with my, uh, Brylcreem. I had a, I had a big wave and, you know, and all of— and my Old Spice, what I would slap on me and walk down there and just hope that she would notice me. Because when I had a rational reason to change— do you have a rational reason to change any of these habits in your life? Create one and then follow the paradigm. The 7th is, can I access universal cooperation in shedding old habits? That's all you have to do is live the virtues and you access divine cooperation by living the virtues. So I'd like to close and tell you— oops— there was a woman, an old woman who lived by the bank of a river in Nepal, and she was a saint by all means. She carried with her a little container where she kept dried pieces of bread, and one day she found a precious stone, and the stone It was so precious that she knew that if she kept it, that she would have everything that she could ever want for the rest of her life. Such was its value, this huge piece of precious stone. And one day a man came walking by the riverbank where she lived, and he asked if she had any bread or anything to eat because he was hungry. And she opened her little bag and she reached in and she gave him some bread. And as he noticed the bag he noticed inside was this beautiful, shining, precious stone that was his guaranteed security for the rest of his life. And he said, I'd like to have that precious stone, please. And she said, here, if you'd like it, you can have it. And she gave it to him, and he left feeling as if he now was taken care of, as if it was a divine intervention. The next day, he returned to the woman, and he said to her, I'm going to give you back this stone, he said, but I'd like to give, have 'Give me something even more precious than that stone.' And she said, 'What would that be?' He said, 'Whatever you have inside of you that allowed you to give me that stone, I'd like you to give to me.' In every moment of your life, you have a choice, and here it is: you can either be a host to God or a hostage to your ego, to that false self. It's your choice. God bless you, and thank you for coming today. To watch another amazing Wayne Dyer video, check it out right there next to me. I think you'll love it.

Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. And it's all done through this process of shifting out of a thought that excludes one and includes another. And you cannot contemplate what you don't want, which almost all of you do on a regular basis, and keep getting surprised