The One Rule Of The Universe You Cannot Ignore (How To Buy The Life You Want) | Wayne Dyer
In this interview, Wayne Dyer shares a series of spiritual teachings that blend metaphor, personal anecdotes, and practical guidance. He begins with a story of four philanthropists in a village, illustrating how external aid can ease suffering but only the fourth philanthropist—a saint—has the key to liberate prisoners, symbolizing the power of inner awakening. Dyer references Carlos Castaneda’s nagual and the concept of a mansion with 1,000 rooms, urging listeners to move beyond daily human awareness. He delineates the dual nature of the self: the ego (E‑G‑O, Earth‑Guide‑Only) that seeks separation, status, and competition, versus the sacred or higher self that seeks peace. He advocates choosing kindness over being right in relationships, emphasizing that this choice cultivates inner peace. Dyer introduces a manifestation formula he calls the “4 Reallys”: (1) Wish – identify what you truly want; (2) Ask – consciously request it; (3) Intend – commit to creating it; (4) Passion – infuse the intention with love. He explains that attention must shift from what is (current circumstances, limitations, others’ expectations) to what you want, because thoughts expand what you experience. He likens healing to plugging into a universal stream of energy, sharing stories of his daughter Sage’s flat warts disappearing after conscious dialogue, and of a quadriplegic’s healing after a kahuna’s insight. Dyer also maps Jung’s archetypal life stages—athlete, warrior, statesman, spirit—showing his own evolution from ego‑driven goals to spiritual purpose. He recounts historical awakenings such as John Newton’s satori on a slave ship, and references Eastern teachings (Tao, satori, natahi) and Western mystics (Tilopa, Swami Muktananda) to illustrate instant awakening. Throughout, he stresses non‑attachment, the power of conscious contact, and the importance of soul‑mates and challenging relationships as teachers. The interview weaves humor, personal family moments, and poetic references to convey a holistic path toward higher consciousness, inner peace, and purposeful manifestation.
Chapters
The currency for attracting what we want into our lives is our thoughts. As you think, so shall you be. There's a law, sort of a law in the universe. I call it the law of attraction. You get back from the universe, from the world, what it is that you put out there in the world. No one ever dies from a snakebite. The snakebite will never kill you. You cannot be unbitten. Once you're bitten, you're bitten. But it's the venom that continues to pour through your system after the bite that will end up destroying you. Probably the best lesson that I've ever learned in my life about how to be in a relationship in a way which is powerful and happy and fulfilling is to remember this sentence.
If 99% of who you are you can't touch and you can't feel and you can't smell, Then where did— what is it? Who is it?
Where are you?
What is this thing called your essence or who you are? And where does it go?
If you're gonna die and 5 minutes before you're ready to leave, they weigh your body and let's say it weighs, oh, let's pick a good number, 150 pounds. All right? And then life leaves your body and they weigh your body instantly. After you're dead, and it still weighs 150 pounds, so that your body weighs the same alive or dead before it begins to deteriorate. And if that's the case, then your life, this thing that leaves your body and your body still weighs the same, is weightless.
Your life is weightless.
You can't put a dimension on it. You can't put a measure on it. Who you are is that life, and that life is not in the dimension of material. Don't get to the end of your life and know that you're going to leave and not have it played yet. Don't die with your music still in you. Hello, Believe Nation. I started the Mentor Me series with the goal of trying to learn from people who've done a lot more than us by surrounding ourselves with them a little bit more than usual to get their ideas and wisdom and The way they think to help us break through our limiting beliefs and become the best version of ourselves.
So today we're going to learn from Wayne Dyer on how to stay motivated. As Wayne is talking, if he says something that is really relevant and helpful to you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well.
And these top 10 principles that I have put together here for this program, you might want to jot down. You might want to go into your A desk and just take out a little piece of paper. But I think if you practice them and look at them and see them, they come from someone who's had a burning desire, but has also been living a life in which I have felt independent of the opinions of others in terms of whether or not I should or shouldn't be doing that. There's something that I allow to consult myself within myself. Mm-hmm. Rather than looking outside to see if this is right or not. And so let me just kind of, I'll number them and I'll go through them and I'll give you some examples of them and you decide whether they're to your liking or whether they work or not. The first of these principles came from a, uh, uh, uh, a Vedantic scholar on the, in the 10th century. His name was Tilopa. It's, uh, it's not exactly bestseller books, but it's the kind of thing that really excites me because I think of going back 1,000 years or 2,000 years and reading what some of the greatest minds had to say and how open they were to, uh, the potentiality that each and every one of us have for greatness. And this first principle says, as Talopa put it, have a mind That is open to everything and attached to nothing. One of the central principles of my life is that no one knows enough to be a pessimist about anything, and that each and every one of us, when we close our mind to what is possible for us or what is possible for humanity, closes off the genius that resides and lives in each and every one of us. Having an open mind doesn't necessarily mean, uh, finding fault with all of the things that you've been taught by others. It means opening yourself up to the potentiality and the possibility that anything and everything is possible. So having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing really means finding within ourselves the ability to get rid of a trait that I find so common in contemporary, in the contemporary world. Do you know that most people that I meet spend their lives looking for occasions To be offended. They actually are out there hoping that they can find some reason to be offended. And there's no shortage of reasons. They're out there everywhere. The way this person dressed, the what this person said. They turn on the TV, they hear the news, they're offended by this. Someone didn't, uh, someone used language that they didn't like. Someone doesn't share the same customs that you. And people all day long, in fact, if you keep track tomorrow, you will find, uh, probably 100 reasons that you can go around being offended. But a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing is a mind that says, I'm never looking for anything to be offended by. And that whatever anybody else out there has to say, my response to that is, that's an interesting point of view. I've never considered that before. I remember, uh, being interviewed for a, uh, morning television show, uh, and the woman that was interviewing me said, how does it feel to be talking to, uh, audiences where people have all of these strange beliefs, these weird things that they come to? And it, it, it, it intrigues me because one of the, uh, One of the things that Emerson said is in one of his very first essays, he says, the first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, where we are right now, is that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mold of these new times. And that was in 1842. He was speaking about that. And this woman asked me the question. She said, uh, doesn't it offend you that there's out— there's people out there and they're talking about people using crystals to heal somebody? And I remember my response. My response was that if I've got hemorrhoids and somebody out there is convincing me that crystals are gonna heal them, I'm ordering crystal chairs. I'm, uh, Why not? Why not? I mean, all you have to do is understand something called a placebo. And what is a placebo? It's nothing more than a convincing belief. If I hand you this pill and say, this pill is gonna cure your arthritis, and you take it and the pill is just a sugar pill, but your arthritis disappears, I'm into buying those placebos. Where can I get some of those placebos? And it's true of everything. And it's when you think about all the things that we enjoy, And what our life is like. Um, it took people who had a mind that wasn't closed to allow us to make the progress that we've made. Progress is impo— is impossible if you always do things the way you've always done things. But the other word in this, what Tilopa said, is be attached nowhere. Be attached nowhere.
Mm-hmm.
Attachment really means I am deluding myself into a belief that if I can't have, or if I can't do this or that thing, then somehow I'm going to become immobilized. So an open mind that is detached. In one of, uh, in my most recent book, in A Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, I have a, um, an observation. And it's, uh, an observation from Anthony de Mello. A man I respect enormously, a priest who, um, in The Way to Love puts it this way. Here's a great test for your relationships, especially the relationships that you're in, uh, with, uh, those whom you love, not your children, but your spouses and your lovers and, and so on. Try this test on for size. One, I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you, I will not be happy. And 2, and here's the toughest test for non-attachment, I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking. How's that for a challenge? And so what most of us do in our relationships and why they are not as successful as we would like them to be is that we become attached and we tell ourself that if this person behaves in a way that I find offensive, then I can't be happy. I make my happiness, my fulfillment dependent upon Those people that I love being what I think that they should be. And detachment doesn't mean being a victim. It just simply means I know that I can make my life fulfilled and happy by having a mind that is open to everything and attached nowhere. The second principle is a very simple principle. It says you can't give away what you don't have. Now it sounds ridiculous, okay? But it's more than what meets the ear as you hear this. You can't give away what you don't have. People who are not good at giving away love can't give away love Because they don't have it to give away. If I want to give you a dozen oranges, I can't give you those dozen oranges unless I go out and pick up 12 oranges someplace. Otherwise, all it is is just empty rhetoric. And the same thing is true of virtually everything in your life. You can't give away love for others if you don't have love in here to give away. If what you have in here is contempt, if what you have in here is anger, if what you have in here is fear, then these are the things you're going to be giving away in your life. And I've often thought, and I really believe very strongly that, uh, there's a law, sort of a law in the universe. I call it the law of attraction. And the law of attraction is one that works like this. You get back from the universe, from the world, what it is that you put out there in the world. And if you are putting out there into the world that I am not worthy of attracting something beautiful into my life, that the universe will respond back to you with exactly that message. And there are people who come to me and who came to me for years when I had, uh, my own, uh, counseling practice and so on, and they would say to me, Um, I just keep attracting the same kind of people, the same kind of events, the same kind of, uh, losers into my life. Why is that? Why do I keep doing that? And I keep attracting, uh, an absence of, uh, of abundance. I just can't seem to attract abundance into my life. I'm always behind the 8 ball. I'm never getting ahead. And I suggested to them, I said, did it ever occur to you that that's the very kind of message you're sending out to the world and out to the universe? That the ocean of abundance is there, and you can go to that ocean of abundance and you can take a Mack truck and you can fill it up 20 times a day and take it out of there. And guess what? It doesn't impact at all the ocean of abundance. It doesn't even go down a zillionth of an inch. It's unlimited. Or you can go to the same ocean of abundance With an eyedropper, and you can just take this much out once a month and say, that's all that seems to be available for me. And the interesting thing for me is that when people go to this ocean of abundance, this, uh, unlimited world, all that I have is thine. It says in the holy books, all that I have is thine. It's all there for you. But if you believe inside That it's limited, that you can only get so much, that other people are gonna get it before you do, then you'll find yourself creating that very same thing. And the even more interesting part about this, you can't give away what you don't have principle, is that if your message to the universe is gimme, gimme, gimme, which is a lot of people's message to the universe. I want this from you. I want that from you. Please gimme this.
I have to have that.
That's what their prayer is like. That's what their message is.
Yeah.
You know, and they say, I want this from the universe. Gimme, gimme, gimme. The universe's response back to that kind of an, uh, mentality is exactly the same. The universe will say right back to you over and over again, gimme, gimme, gimme. And you'll find yourself never ever arriving, but always being in a state of striving, always feeling as if you're being neglected, never feeling as if you have enough. Always feeling as if you're being shortchanged because you're constantly under the pressure to give, to get back what the universe is demanding from you. And the interesting thing about all of this, the, the irony of this is that if you shift that and you say to the universe, to the world, how may I serve? How may I serve? The universe's response back to you is, How may I serve you?
How may I serve you?
And it's very intriguing when you take your energy and your attention off of what you are demanding from the world and instead saying, what can I give to the world? And it's really the, the basis behind that very famous line of the, uh, President, uh, John Kennedy's, uh, inaugural address. Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do. For your country. And the irony of that is, and I've learned that in my own life, that when I stopped thinking about what was in it for Wayne Dyer and how much could I get, and I began to shift and say, how can I help you? How can I give to you? What can I do for you? And people who write to me, pe— uh, I send them something. When, when I encounter somebody that needs help of some kind, I'm very often just giving that to them. And then I find That it just keeps coming back into my life. And once I shifted that energy off of what can I have into what can I give, it seemed to me that the universe responded back with the very same message. What can I give to you? And the most incredible and wonderful and beautiful abundance has flowed into my life in every way that I can possibly think of. You can't give away what you don't have. So take a look at an inventory of what you do have. How much do you love yourself? How much kindness do you have in you? How much peace do you have in you? How much joy do you have in you? And if you're able to give that away as many times as you can in a given day, watch and see how much more of that continues to show up and come back in your life.
Okay.
The 3rd principle is one of my very favorites. It's called, there are no justified resentments. And this is a very difficult principle for many people to get, but one that I believe very strongly in. I was in a group one time of, uh, drug addicts and alcoholics. And I was, uh, one of the people that was a sponsor and leading this group. And the sign on the wall said, there are no justified resentments in this group. And what I said to that group that, that night was, no matter what anybody says to you here, no matter what kind of, uh, uh, anger comes directed towards you, No matter how much hate you may encounter showing up in your life, there are no justified resentments. Meaning that if you carry around resentment inside of you about anything or about anyone, and I'm talking about the person that you lent money to and hasn't paid you back, I'm talking about the person in your life that you feel was abusive. In your life. I'm talking about the person who walked out on you and left you for somebody else. I'm talking about all of the things that you have justified in your heart and in your life that you have the right to be resentful about. And I'm suggesting to you that those resentments will always end up harming you and creating in you A sense of despair. I've often said that you, no one ever dies from a snakebite. The snakebite will never kill you. You cannot be unbitten. Once you're bitten, you're bitten. But it's the venom that continues to pour through your system after the bite that will end up destroying you. So now you have to take a look at all of the resentments that you may have in your life. And I'd like to suggest to you that I think there is a wonderful metaphor for this that I have created in my life for how to make this work. And I think that Regis Philbin is the one who's responsible for it. All right, my buddy Regis. There's a show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Millionaire that has been popular all over the world. I'm in South Africa, it comes on. All right. I was in Australia and they've got their own Australian version. Um, and in Greece they have the Greek edition of, uh, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And basically this show has 2 levels that you have to get to. Now, the first level is the $1,000 level. And at the $1,000 level, you basically have to answer a question like, On your hand, you have some digits. Those digits on your hand are called your feet, your nose, your ears, your fingers. Uh, and everybody whoever goes on the show has this horrible dread that they're gonna go out on one of those questions, right? So basically, in order to get to the thousand dollar level, all you have to do is answer five. Pretty simple, simple questions in order to, uh, to get to the $1,000 level. Now, on this program, the $1,000 level for you in this metaphor means that you will leave with something if you get this, at least get this. This is the $1,000 level. You must send blame out of your life. For any conditions of your life. Blame has to go.
All right?
Now, blame means if you are sitting there with a disease, you say without guilt, it's mine. I take responsibility for it. This means that if you have been through any tough circumstances in your life, this means if you have a minimal amount of, uh, of financial security in your life, This means if your children don't, uh, get along with you, this means that, uh, if your neighbors are having, taking up a petition to get you outta the neighborhood, whatever it might be that's going on in your life, you name it. And everybody across the, this great country and across this world has a series of these things that you are willing to say, I am here because of the choices that I have made right now. I'm willing to say that even though it's difficult and we know it's really not your fault. We know really there's a lot of people out there who are really bad. All right. But, but you're willing to say no blame. That's the first level. All right. That's where you understand no justified resentment. And then on the, uh, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show, there is what is called the $32,000 level. And the $32,000 level is not only an opportunity for you to walk away with a sizable amount of goodies. Which you can walk away from tonight in this program. But it also is the door opener to multi-wealth. But you gotta get to this in order to have an opportunity to move into these transcendent levels.
All right?
Millionaire spiritual, uh, status.
All right?
You gotta get through these next 5 questions and this $32,000 question. Or level rather, comes to this. It came to me from a quotation that I used in the writing of A Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. I read the, uh, a book that was written a couple of thousand years ago by Patanjali, the Yoga Sutras, the aphorisms of Patanjali. And one of those sutras, one of those aphorisms, observations that this brilliant man made almost 2,000 years ago was this. He said, if you become steadfast in your abstentions of thoughts of harm directed towards others, all living creatures, Will cease to feel enmity in your presence. Now, this translates to blame. Pretty basic. No more blame. I'm just not going to assign responsibility to other people for where I am because now I have an opportunity to get rid of it. If I think someone else caused it, then I've gotta wait for somebody else to change in order for me to get rid of it. And you might wait forever for that. But if I take responsibility for it, I can do something, including move on, which might be the most important thing to do.
All right?
But at the higher level, when there are no justified resentments, what you are doing is what St. Francis did. Francesco, what you are doing is you are at a place where you are sending love in response To hate. You are literally saying, no matter what comes my way, I am going to be steadfast in my abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others. I'm going to work hard at no matter what comes my way, having it come out of me what I want to come out of me, and that is love, and that is a higher energy. And if you can get to that level, Patanjali said, all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in your presence. I have a little girl, a precious little girl. I have 6 precious girls and 2 precious sons, but I have a, uh, a little girl who is almost 12, and she loves animals like no one I've ever met in my life. I mean, her whole life revolves around animals. And when we walk in the woods, butterflies, Avoid me. Fly away from people around. And they come and they land right on her arm. And it happens all the time. All living creatures. She couldn't have a thought of harm directed towards any living creature. And Patanjali said to us, all living creatures will cease to feel fear or enmity or anger in the presence of those who Who can send love in response to the hate. That's what I mean when I say there are no justified resentments. What I'd like to do, I'd like to share a little story here with you. It's a very tender story. It was sent to me by someone who sends me beautiful things in the mail, and I call it the Teddy story. And I'd like to read this to you if I can do it without tearing up. And this story illustrates this as well as anything I've ever seen. There's a story many years ago of an elementary school teacher. Her name was Mrs. Thompson. As she stood in front of her 5th grade class on the very first day of school, she told the children a lie. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same, but that was impossible because There in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard. Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he didn't play well with the other children, that his clothes were messy, and that he constantly needed a bath. Teddy could be unpleasant. It got to the point where Mrs. Thompson would actually take delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen. And making bold Xs and then putting a big F at the top of his papers. At the school where Mrs. Thompson taught, she was required to review each child's past records, and she put Teddy's off until last. However, when she reviewed his file, she was in for a surprise. Teddy's first grade teacher wrote, Teddy is a bright child with a ready laugh. He does his work neatly and he has good manners. He's a joy to be around. His second grade teacher wrote, Teddy's an excellent student, well-liked by his classmates, but he's troubled because his mother has a terminal illness and life at home must be a struggle. His third grade teacher wrote, his mother's death has been hard on him. He tries to do his best, but his father doesn't show much interest and his home life will soon affect him if steps aren't taken. Teddy's 4th grade teacher wrote, Teddy's withdrawn and doesn't show up much interest in school. He doesn't have many friends, and sometimes he even sleeps in class. By now, Mrs. Thompson realized the problem, and she was ashamed of herself. She felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas presents wrapped in beautiful ribbons and, and bright paper, except for Teddy's. His present was clumsily wrapped and it Heavy brown paper that he got from the grocery bag. Mrs. Thompson took pains to open it in the middle of the other presents. Some of the children started to laugh when she found a rhinestone bracelet with some of the stones missing and a bottle that was one quarter full of perfume, but she stifled her children's laughter when she exclaimed how pretty the bracelet was, putting it on and dabbing some of the perfume on her wrist. Teddy Stoddard stayed after school that day just long enough to say, Mrs. Thompson, today you smell just like my mom used to. After the children left, she cried for at least an hour. On the very day she quit teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and instead she began to teach children. Mrs. Thompson paid particular attention to Teddy as she worked with him and his mind seemed to come alive. The more she encouraged him, the faster he responded. By the end of the year, Teddy had become one of the smartest children in the class, and despite her lie, became one of her teacher's pets. A year later, she found a note under the door from Teddy telling her that she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life. 6 years went by before she got another note from Teddy. He then wrote that he had finished high school 3rd in his class. And she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life. 4 years after that, she got another letter saying that while things had been tough at times, he stayed in school and stuck with it and would soon graduate from college with the highest of honors. He assured Mrs. Thompson that she was still the very best and favorite teacher he ever had in his whole life. Then 4 more years passed and yet another letter came. This time he explained that after he got his bachelor's degree, he decided to go a little further. The letter explained that she was still the best and favorite teacher he ever had, but now his name was a little longer. The letter was signed Theodore F. Stoddard, MD. But the story doesn't end there. You see, there was yet another letter that spring. Teddy said he'd met this girl and was gonna be married. He explained that his father had died a couple of years ago, and he was wondering if Mrs. Thompson might agree to sit in the place at the wedding that was usually reserved for the mother of the groom. Of course Mrs. Thompson did. And guess what? She wore that bracelet, the one with, uh, several rhinestones missing, and she made sure she was wearing the perfume that Teddy remembered his mother wearing on their last Christmas together. They hugged each other and Dr. Stoddard whispered in Mrs. Thompson's ear, thank you so much for making me feel important and showing me that I could make a difference. Mrs. Thompson came with tears in her eyes and whispered back, Teddy, you have it all wrong. You were the one who taught me that I could make a difference. I didn't know how to teach until I met you. Isn't that a beautiful story?
Yeah.
That symbolizes there are no justified resentments. Work at reaching that $32,000 level, the place where the only thing you have to send is love, because that's what's inside. And that's the message of our greatest spiritual teachers. That's all they ever had to give away. The next Principle I call, don't die with your music still in you. And who better to quote than Thoreau right here in Concord when he talked about some of us hear a different drummer and we must march to the music that we hear. But all of you, everybody watching, everybody here in this beautiful parish, all of you have some music playing. And all of you have a heroic mission. There's no accidents in this universe. We all show up here with a purpose. There's an intelligence that is a part of everything and everyone, and all of us are connected to it. And too many of us are afraid to listen to that music and march to it. You out there, I know you have a book you wanted to write. I know there's a composition you wanted to compose. I know there's a song you wanna sing someplace. Maybe you wanna raise horses out in Montana, or maybe you wanna open up an ice cream shop on Cape Cod. Who knows what it may be? Maybe you just want to travel and see the world. Maybe you want to go into a relationship with someone, but you've been afraid to, but your heart says it's the Right thing to do. All of us feel something. And in Leo Tolstoy's famous novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he asks this question that would be terrifying to me. He says, as he has his accountant from Moscow lying on his deathbed contemplating the horror of this question, what if my whole life has been wrong? I've known what my music is. It's playing right now as I stand here in front of you with these cameras and in this place. And as I sit down and write my books and tell the world what I know are my truths, I feel always completely on purpose and fulfilled. And no time will I ever come to the end of my life and say, what if my whole life is Been wrong. Whoever you are, whatever that music is, however distant it may sound, however strange, however weird others may interpret it to be, don't get to the end of your life and know that you're going to leave and not have it played yet. Don't die with your music still in you. It's the message of, uh, the greatest teachers who've ever walked among us. It's the message I give to you today as one of the principles for success and peace in your life. The next principle I call embracing silence. And embracing silence is not that I say this to you because it's so important to be quiet. What I have learned, I have a dear friend, and many of you know, we've put out tapes together. We've appeared on stages all over the world together. He's like a brother to me. His name is Dr. Deepak Chopra, a medical doctor and a dear and close friend. And whenever anything is going on in my family, if I'm having a problem with one of my children or with my— in my own life, and if I call him up and I'll say, Deepak, or his wife Rita, I'll say, Deepak, what do you think I should do? He always has the same answer. Meditate. I'll say, yes, Deepak, I understand meditate. But I said, what do you think? He said, Wayne, go deep inside and meditate. Always meditate. I'll say, will you put Rita on? Wayne, meditate. I say, all right. And you know, I've learned a lot in meditation, but what I know most about getting quiet and getting peaceful is this, that there's only one power in the universe, and it doesn't matter what you call it. You can call it soul, spirit, consciousness, God. You can call it Louise. You can call it anything that you want. But as Alan Watts said, you can't get wet from the word water. It's not what we call something that gives it its substance. And this one power, this one force that flows through everything and allows everything to be, is indivisible. You can't cut it in half. You can't divide it. It's one. It's knowing the one. And everything in your life is almost always given a division. Male, female, young, old, tall, short, black, white, good, bad, up, down. These are all dichotomies. These are all these splits that we all have in our lives. The whole physical world that we live in and are immersed in, it's always immersed in This division. I used to teach course at St. John's University in New York, and I used to tell my students when I was trying to teach this principle, anybody who can come to class and bring with them a magnet that only has a north pole, I'll give you an A in the course. You don't ever have to attend another class. And no matter how thin they would slice that magnet, There was always the South Pole because the physical world is made up of dichotomies. But we have to learn to fuse the dichotomies. And in fusing the dichotomies and blending the one, that's what silence does for us. That's why embracing silence is so powerful, because no matter how many times you cut silence in half, it's like zero. You still only get silence. In Zen, they say it's the, uh, it's the space between the bars that holds the tiger, and it's the silence between the notes that makes the music. These words that are coming out of my mouth right now come out of the silence, and finding that silence and embracing it means that you go to the place within you that you cannot divide. Just like you can't divide the source, the one, the spirit. You can't divide that either. It's only one. So when you go into your silence and you begin to practice meditation and you begin to make this a part of your life and embrace silence, what you discover is this is where you'll come to know your source. You'll make conscious contact with your source. I can't tell you how many people that have come to me who have suffered from serious illnesses, who've been giving— given diagnoses that it's terminal and that you can't do it, who have gone out to the wilderness and have decided that I am going to commune with nature. And the Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson, they believed that nature was our source. And that we were all products of nature. And if you can get back to your source, if you can get back to that feeling of being with spirit, that, that's where healing can take place. And I've had wonderful stories of people who've told me that it was when I began to embrace that silence that I began to feel more connected to my source. Embrace silence because it's a way to come to know God, to know your source. Both are indivisible, and the only experience you can have in your daily life that even comes close to a spiritual awake awakening is silence. The next principle I call giving up your personal history, and I learned it from a man named Carlos Castaneda, who once said that, um, one day he said, I finally realized that I no longer needed a personal history. And just like drinking, he said, I gave it up. And that, and only that, has made all the difference in the world. You know, the nice thing about giving up your personal history is that if you don't have a story, you don't have to live up to it. All of us have these bags of manure that we carry around with us called our past and the people who have done things to us and the events and the circumstances, all of this stuff that we use and we bond to. And we bond ourself to these wounds of our past and we identify ourself on the basis of these wounds. And every once in a while we set it down and we reach in there and we smear it all over ourselves. And then we wonder, why does my life smell so bad? I don't understand this. When in fact, the now, this moment, merging yourself into the now means that you may have been in a relationship. I had a woman from Holland who came over to see me whose husband had left her after 25 years. She had 4 children and she just had been on the verge of suicide and she was losing weight and she was depressed and she was taking all kinds of drugs for it. And she was getting sicker and sicker because she just couldn't get over it. And she came to a book signing that I was doing at a bookstore down in Florida, and she said, you've got to say something to me. You've got to say something to me that will help me to get over this. And I told her this line. I said, give up your personal history. Merge yourself here now into this moment.
Mm-hmm.
And those 25 years are something. If you want to understand how to do it, think of your past as, oh, this hat. And this is your past. Now, you can't just set this thing down over here and walk away from it and give up your personal history because you'll always have it there to look back at. What you do is you pick up Your past and you embrace it. You understand it, you accept it as I had to go through these things that I had to go through in order for me to get to this place today. And the evidence for that is that I did. You don't need any more evidence. You did. And then you toss it. You toss it. You embrace it and you toss it. And you merge into the now by giving up your attachment. And some of you have heard me use the metaphor of the wake. Alan Watts talked about the wake is not what drives the boat. The wake is just a trail that is left behind. That's all it is. And so is the wake of your life. And the wake doesn't make the boat go, and neither does the wake of your life, the reason why your life is going in the direction that it is. The wake is a trail that is left behind. And it's an illusion to believe that it is the cause of your suffering or your struggles or your difficulty. Give it up. Let it go. Embrace it. Understand it. Get help doing that if you must, and then move into the now. The next principle I call, it's from a line of, uh, Albert Einstein. He said, you can't solve a problem With the same mind that created it. In order to work at solving these things called problems in your life, you have to change your mind. It is your mind where they live. It is your mind that created them. They— there is where you experience them. They're all illusions. You must change your mind, literally rewrite your agreement with reality. One of the things I had said earlier is that one of the most difficult things to do in the world is to admit that you were wrong. Admitting that you were wrong is nothing more than saying, I have been making choices with my mind that have created things in my life that are not working, and I no longer intend to continue making those choices. Choices. I was wrong. You don't have to make a declaration of it. You don't have to go out and feel guilty about it. You just simply say, it didn't work. The relationship that I was in before, I behaved in these ways. I didn't realize that it wasn't working for me. Now I do, and this is where I choose to be. Now, the secret of a successful relationship Is to me understanding that you put your attention and your energy in a person on what you love rather than what you don't love. Robert Frost said it so beautifully, we love the things we love for what they are, for what they are, not for what they ought to be, not for what they used to be, but for what they are. So when you look into the eyes of The person you're in a relationship with, whether it's your children, you catch them doing things right as much as you possibly can. That oftentimes takes a lot of hunting, but you'll find it. And when you think that my relationship isn't working, remember it's in my mind. What am I thinking about that person? And if I could just change my mind and put my thoughts on what I love about this person and keep them there, That makes the relationship flourish. And there are people who go through their entire relationship history with no anger, no hatred, no bitterness, and only love. The next principle is, I call it treating yourself as if you already were what you would like to become. In other words, you get out in front of your life and you see yourself as As having already what you know you'd like to have and deserve to have. My children know how to do this perfectly. I have a daughter who wanted a prom dress, and the prom dress was way outside the budget that I thought a prom dress should be. Uh, well, I thought a prom dress shouldn't cost over $20, so I do have a problem, huh? But I upped it to somewhere around $250. I don't know how much, whatever. To me, it was still Still more than I paid for my first house.
Okay.
Uh, but anyway, she called and said, Dad, this is the only prom dress I could wear. This is the— I've got to wear this prom dress. If I don't wear this prom dress, it's just on and on and on with this, uh, wonderful— you know, I've got a— I saw a wonderful book about how to raise teenage, uh, daughters. The title of it is Get Out of My Life, but First Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall. All right. That's the, that's the actual title. It's a good book. And so I told Serena, I said, uh, it's just beyond the budget. I've got a certain amount of money that I'm willing to put for it. And she said, but I've already seen myself wearing it. I've already tried it on. I have a picture of myself in the dress in my living room, and I've already showed it to the guy who was taking me to the prom. I mean, it was this whole thing about— and she already saw herself in it. I said, well, if you see yourself in it, then you're going to have to also see yourself as earning The difference between what I'm willing to pay. And she drew up a contract. She went onto the computer and on the background of the computer, you know where they have these little background things they put on, there was 500 pictures of the dress. All right. And she signed a contract and said, I'll babysit, I'll do this, I'll do that, and I will pay the difference. And she did. And she wore the dress because she understood that you treat yourself as if you already are what you'd like to become. There's a genius in you. You have to treat yourself as if you already were that genius. There's something you're completely capable of. See yourself as already there. Then you'll act upon those thoughts because the ancestor to every action, said Emerson, is a thought. The next principle is called treasuring your divinity. Treasuring your divinity. There's a wonderful observation that I saw. From, uh, from Emerson in Self-Reliance. It's about trusting your divinity, knowing that you are connected to your source, knowing that you are a divine creation and that there are no accidents. He said, a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought because it's his own. In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. We often reject our thoughts and we see the things that we think of as grand and as genius, and we reject them because they're our own. Treasuring our divinity instead of being terrified of it. Knowing that I am always connected to my source. There is no way that I cannot, because it is in you and I am in you and you are in me, and you can never be separated from it. There is no place that this source is not. It grows everybody's fingernails. It beats everybody's hearts. It digests everybody's foods. It opens all the flowers, and you're always connected to it. And finally, the last principle I call wisdom is avoiding all thoughts which weaken you. You know, every thought has an energy just like everything else in the universe. And if you have a thought of shame, it will weaken your muscles. And what is your heart but a muscle? If you raise a child to believe in shame and feel ashamed of themselves, every time they think that shameful thought, They will be weakened. And if you have a thought of fear, and if you have a thought of stress, and you have a thought of anguish and anxiety, all of these thoughts and many more are the thoughts that will always weaken you. When you are having a thought that you know is disempowering you, shift it, shift it to one that is empowering rather than disempowering. And the thoughts that empower are thoughts of neutrality and willingness And love, and ultimately thoughts of divinity. And when you see a troubled person who is out there struggling at the highest level of unity consciousness or God consciousness or spiritual consciousness, you recognize yourself in all that you see there. But for the grace of God go I, and I am connected to that Changing your thoughts. I appeared on The Tonight Show many years ago, several times, quite a few times. And I remember coming home from The Tonight Show and I was walking along the beach and they had taped the show the night before. And I was out for a walk and a woman who lived in, uh, the Northeast stopped me and she said, didn't I see you last night on the— how could you be here? I said, well, I flew the red-eye. And I was walking along and she said, you know, we're moving down here. She said, um, what are the people like here?
What's it like?
And I said to her, I said, well, what are they like where you live? She said, well, she said, uh, I live in a very big city. And she said, uh, they're very pushy and people are not very kind and they don't have time for you. And she said, uh, it's really not very pleasant. She said, that's one of the reasons I'm leaving there. I said, well, that's pretty much what you're gonna find here. That's basically what the people are like here. On the way back on the same day, someone else who had seen me the night before on The Tonight Show, who had lived in the Midwest, stopped me and asked me almost the same question. She said, you live here? I said, yes. She said, well, my husband and I are moving here and we're looking for a school. She said, what are the people like here?
What's it like here? I said, what are they like in, in, uh, Chicago where you live?
She said, oh, she said, it's the Midwest. She said, people are very friendly.
They're open.
They open their homes to you. They're very loving. They're very kind. She said, it's a wonderful place. She said, I love that. I'm gonna really miss that. I said, that's pretty much what you're gonna find here. It's what you expect. It's what you think about that expands. It's what Emerson taught us. The ancestor to every action is a thought. Change your thoughts and you change your world. Change your expectations and you change around what you begin to manifest and see showing up in your life.
You are the sum total of all of the choices that you've made up until now, and anything about yourself or your life that you don't like or isn't working or isn't mobilizing you is to be looked at in terms of Can I grow rather than why did I do it? Or isn't this wrong? See, the 2 ways to motivate yourself are deficiency motivation, which says where I am, I don't like, I don't like what I've done. I don't like the fact that I can't do this well, or I can't do that well. So I will list these things in my own repertoire, and then I will be constantly trying to repair those deficiencies. Always assuming that I'm deficient, that there's something wrong with me and I'm trying to fix it. And when you do that, you spend your whole life doing that and you never arrive because your life becomes a series of trying to get someplace else. And it is, if you follow that, if you live that, if you behave that, then what you, what happens to you is you become a person who will always suffer from this disease called more. You always have to have more because whenever you are getting where you want to go, let's say you want $100,000 in the bank and you work and you struggle and you deny yourself and you do all of those things and you finally, finally you get there and here you are, you got $100,000 in the bank. All of this stuff over here is of course your life and that is all you know. That's what you know how to, that's how you are. That is your being. That is your way of being. So that when you do get here, what you will do is say, this is not enough. You must, a no-limit person is never operating from deficiency or from lack in their life. They're never saying, I don't have enough. You see, you're never going to get enough. You already are everything. You're everything that you need. Think of it for just a moment. Everything that you need to have total bliss, perfection of your life, you already are. You already have it. You came into this world with nothing. That's how you're going out. And the time that you have here, it, what you have is your uniqueness, your specialness, and you don't need anything else. Now think on this. If you don't know how to appreciate what you have and where you are in your life, you don't need anything else. Because if you do get something else, you won't know how to appreciate that either. You'll just want more, or you'll want it to be different, or you'll want it to be the way it used to be, or you'll want someone else to be the way you think they should be. Successful people or no-limit people or self-actualizing people or inner-directed people, however you, whatever labels that have been put on them by great thinkers and philosophers and therapists and people, uh, that have I looked at human beings. These kinds of people are people who always have enough. There are some people, if you invite them over and you say, um, you know, I'd like you to, uh, I'd like you to come over tonight and I'd, I, I'd like you to stay over if you can instead of having to drive back. And they'll say, well, I, can you say, can you stay? And I say, well, I don't know if I can stay or not. Um, well, you could sleep on the cot. Oh no, no, I could never sleep on The cot. I don't, I can't sleep on cots. Uh, I got sciatica. Don't you know that I have, I have back pain and the way I don't, cots? No, that's outta the question. I couldn't sleep on a cot. Uh, and what about breakfast? Well, we don't have any food, but, um, we have some old grapefruit that are in the, uh, in the, uh, refrigerator. They have a few spots on 'em. Oh no, I could never eat grapefruit in spots. No thanks. I can't eat grapefruit spots. I just couldn't do that.
You know?
And these are people who, uh, never have enough. They are, are not able to be flexible and to change. And there are other people, if you say, would you like to sleep over? Uh, we got a place in the sewer.
Hey, that'd be great.
I can handle that. No problem. I slept there before. It's all right.
And all we have is grapefruit.
Oh, I love grapefruit. Well, we got, there's got spots on 'em. Oh, I really like grapefruit spots. Those are terrific.
I'll, I'll go for those.
There are some people who can handle anything, not because their circumstances are different. You see, your circumstances have very little to do with your fulfillment in life. Very little. It's, it's how you are approaching your circumstances. It's your attitude towards your circumstances that make all the difference in the world. And taking what you are and accepting it. I gotta show you this. I don't know if the camera can get this. This is a little, uh, advertisement that was in the Detroit Free Press, uh, for, uh, last September. I was giving a speech at the Unity Church of Today in Detroit, and it says, uh, Dr. Wayne Dyer will talk about your inner child and how to deal effectively with problems in all relationships. And it was a real nice ad. You can see that. Then on top of the ad in the same paper, there's another ad. And the ad says, face it, right on top of my ad. There's no hiding from hair loss. And they got a picture of a guy with a box Over his head.
And they have a before and after guy there.
And the after guy looks like he's just found fulfillment. And it says, you can't run and you can't hide. Hair loss is a problem. And unless you take action, it will continue. Now we've gotta look at this, uh, In terms of, uh, what I can do with this and how I can handle this. See, my daughter helped me with being bald a long time ago.
She said, Dad, you're not really bald.
Don't think of yourself that way. She said, you're just about this much taller than your hair. That's all. Which is sort of a nice way to look at it too. I just sort of outgrew my hair. I sort of transcended my hair, if you will. All right. No limit people are human beings who Take what they are and accept it and don't tell themselves that somehow they're deficient because of anything about themselves. This is a very crucial, uh, concept for, for me and for virtually all of us. It's this idea of taking your life in your own hands and being the kind of person that you choose to be and understanding that everything that comes your way is an opportunity, is a blessing. And it wasn't until I learned how to celebrate virtually everything that came my way that I was able to transcend it. You see, everything that was given to us by God, whatever that is, is perfect. No one can deny the mountains are perfect and the rivers are perfect and the birds are perfect and the hippopotamuses are perfect and, and, and so on. This is just what was given to us. Everything else that you have on our planet, that we have on our planet, comes about As a result of thinking. Thinking. Thought makes it so. All right. This microphone comes about as a result of thinking. Somebody imagines it. Somebody then tells somebody else about, and it's, and it creates it. The dress that you're wearing, this shirt that I'm, the shoes that you have, the stage, these cameras, everything that you see that wasn't given to us was created by man. As a result of the way that we think, the way that we think. So what gets inside of us as a cell comes about as a result of the way that we choose to think in our lives. Very important principle to understand because once you get ahold of thinking and that it creates everything that you have in your life, you can change and make it as absolutely perfect as you want it to be because Thought makes it so. Creative visualization is what we're talking about here. You, the imagery or the image that you have of anything in your life is really like mental behavior. It's like going out and practicing. If you go out and practice with a basketball shooting, uh, free throws over and over again, that's physical practice. Imagery is mental practice. It's mental behavior. When you have an image that you can succeed at some, at something, when you have an image that you can do it rather than that you can't do it, When you get into your car and you have an image that you're going to find a parking place rather than that there'll be no place to park, so you're not looking for no place to park, you will start acting on the image that you have very much like you will start acting on the practice that you have when you're shooting baskets or when you're hitting a forehand or, or working on your soup or anything else that you're doing. Bucky Fuller, who I served with on the Hunger Project Advisory Council for 9 years, who died not too long ago, said that 99% Of who you are. You can't touch, you can't see, you can't smell. 99% of you is untouchable, unsmellable, invisible. It is what Ken Keyes has called your, your conscious awareness. It's your, it's what looks out behind those eyeballs. What is that? It isn't, it isn't cells. It's some kind of conscious awareness. That you are. And make no mistake about it, you've occupied a whole lot of bodies already. Now, this is not reincarnation talk, although I don't know about this reincarnation. People ask me if I believe in it. I say, well, I taught in a junior high school in the inner city of Detroit for 4 years, and I saw those dead bodies come to life every day at 3 o'clock.
So I believe.
In reincarnation. All right. Now, if what you, if 99% of who you are, you can't touch and you can't feel and you can't smell, then where did, what is it? Who is it?
Where are you?
What is this thing called your essence or who you are and where does it go? Now think of this. You were in a body. I have a little baby girl who's, uh, 11 months old and she, and we were all in a body that size. Well, it's only a body about this big. Got fingers only this long. You know, got, uh, tiny, tiny little parts all over the place. I mean, she's only this tall.
Now, is that her?
Is that her essence? Because I have other children who are much older, and I am much older than that, and I can remember being 3 and being in a different body. Still me, still my essence there. Different body, totally different. Doesn't even look anything like When I was 11 months old, and then I was 13 and I had a funny body at 13, but still my essence was there in a whole new body. Hairs growing all over the place that I didn't understand, all kinds of things happening to it, you know. Then hairs falling out of it later on. You know, looking at those hairs that fall out and say, what held it in yesterday?
You know what? I dunno.
I don't even understand that. Okay. And so it's like, And who I am has been in many, many bodies already. All right? And that essence, you see, everything on our planet that is alive can never die. It can never die. Life doesn't die. It just transforms. It just moves on to new places and new ways of being, new ways of being. And the way of being that is the most transcendent of all is this way That comes from seeing yourself as love and only having that to give away. Only having that to give away. Let's say I were to stand up here in front of you and just visualize for a moment that I have an orange and I take this orange and I squeeze it as hard as I can squeeze it. Okay? What's gonna come out?
Juice.
Juice. What kind of juice?
Orange juice.
Orange juice. Apple juice, any chance? Once in a while. Come on, now and then. Little mango juice come out of an orange once in a while. No mistakes, right? Never. No matter what. Next question. Everybody passes. These are easy. Okay? Why, when you squeeze an orange as hard as you can squeeze it, does orange juice come out? Because that's not because it's an orange, because That's what's inside, isn't it? On our planet, when you squeeze something, what comes out of it is what's inside. Not too difficult. All right. Does it matter if your mother squeezes the orange? Does it matter what instrument she uses?
Does it matter if you just had your period and then you squeeze an orange?
Does it matter if your boss squeezes it? How about if your kids do it? Your kids squeeze an orange. Does it matter? Does it matter what time of day? Suppose they do it at noon. All right. How about at 4 in the morning? Does that matter? Whenever you squeeze an orange, the only thing you get out is what's inside, right? No arguments. Same thing works for you. Same principle works for you. It's a principle of the universe. All right. Someone squeezes you. That is, someone puts pressure on you. Someone says things about you that you don't like. Someone puts, uh, attention on you, whatever. Your boss says something to you that you don't like, and out of you comes anger, and out of you comes hatred, and out of you comes fear, or out of you comes stress. Or out of you comes tension.
Why is it because of your boss and the way they squeeze you?
Never. Is it because of your mother? I mean, she really can be a pain sometimes, right? Is it because of your children? No. What comes out of you always when someone squeezes you is what's inside. This is the, the vital principle of being a no-limit person. It's so crucial to get This and understand that, that if you have any hatred in your heart for anyone in this world, or any anger or any fear or any of those things, it has nothing to do with the rest of the world. It only has to do with what you put inside. Now, how does what gets inside of you get there? That's the key. How does it get there? As you think.
Think.
Only as you think. You see, there's no anger in the world. There's no stress in the world. There's no tension. It's perfect. We've already established it's perfect place. It works just fine. It's all flowing the way it's supposed to flow. The evidence for it is it is. That's all the evidence you need. Just look around you. Everything out there's a miracle. Everything, including you. There are no mistakes. It's all perfect. And everything that happens to you in your life, whether it's a trauma, whether it's a disease, whether it's somebody treating you in a certain way, there's a lesson in all of it. No-limit people understand the lesson in life and therefore celebrate the lessons. It's true. And when you get to that point in your life where you're not cursing the things that come your way and blaming the things that come your way, and particularly blaming it on somebody else— and you hear it all the time, she hurt my feelings. How's that possible? How can anybody hurt your feelings? Your feelings come from your thoughts.
That's right.
No one can hurt your feelings without your consent. No one can make a fool of you without your consent. No one can embarrass you without your consent. These are choices that you have that come from the way that you think. Someone calls you a name, hey stupid, and you turn around. I didn't even tell anybody I was coming. How did they know that? Huh? And then you blame the person who called you a name instead of saying, that's just their opinion. That's just where they are. That's where they are on the path.
And it's okay.
All of you are in relationships, right? Everybody has a relationship of some kind or another. In your relationship, you have any problems? Any of you have relationship, you don't have any problems? I'd like you to take this microphone. I wanna sit down and listen to You, you know, everybody in a relationship has problems, don't they? Right now, when you say, I'm in a relationship, I got problems, therefore there's something wrong. Something's really wrong. All right. Now, if you're in a relationship and you have problems and something is wrong, you gotta call in a consultant, right? You gotta call in somebody to help you with the problems. You don't want the problems to go on. Who are you gonna call in? You only got yourself. That's all you got. You might get a therapist once in a while, but they got worse problems than you do. The only consultant who can help you with your problems is you. And who is that consultant that you're calling in? We've already established that there's something wrong with that person, right? Something wrong. So now you're gonna call in a disabled person to deal with your problems. In your relationship, right? Now this is a really sick approach to curing your problems. You got somebody who says, we got a problem.
You don't talk to me and I don't talk to you.
And you came home late last week and this week I called you and you didn't call and I was supposed to call you and then you didn't do it.
And how can you do that?
Now this is the consultant you're calling. Excuse me, will you come in and help us?
I don't know if I can help you or not. I didn't come home. I didn't— That's the person you got to deal with your problems.
All right? Now what you can do is you can change all of that around. You can say, I'm in a relationship, we got problems.
That's right.
There's nothing wrong with that. That's the way things are. You know, my problem is that you are different than I am and you think differently than I do and you behave differently than I do and you smell different than I do and you have all of these attitudes over here that I don't have. Nothing wrong with that. That's the way it is. When 2 people get together in a relationship, you don't have 2 people becoming one. If you do that, then what you end up with are 2 half persons. Who wants a half a person in a relationship? You always are single, even if you're married and for, you know, and involved in relationship forever, you're still always single. You're still always you, your unique, special, perfect self that is not trying to love. But who is love?
Who lives love?
Who is being love? The same as if you pray to God and say, God, will you please help me with my problems? And want God to do it for you. Never happen. You've got to be God, not be afraid to carry God around inside of you. If you want to get healed, you have got to understand That you're not going to get healed if you are asking someone else to heal you. And ask any doctor that you know, any surgeon particularly who's taking somebody into surgery, and ask them which person has a better chance of living and surviving, say, serious surgery. Is it the one who has a will to live, or is it the one who's just given up? And the surgery and the cases are exactly the same. All right? But the person who has that will, which we can't define, you can't go out and get a bucket full of will. And bring it in there. It's an attitude, it's an approach, it's a belief. All right. That you can do something. And when you have that belief about yourself, then, you know, you've got a so much better, uh, opportunity to be well in your life. And a belief is everything. I don't know if you've ever thought of that. Uh, I watch, uh, a little girl, 5 years old, learning how to swim, and she's holding onto the edge of the pool and she wants to get over here to the steps and it's just, uh, 5 feet or 6 feet.
Yeah.
And she'll let go and then she'll hold on again and she'll let go and she'll hold on again. And finally there comes a time when she lets go and goes for it. Okay? You've all seen, you've seen this with your children. You've seen, and what you ask yourself is in the moment before that, when she was holding on, and then look at the moment afterwards, does she have any different skills?
What's changed?
Yeah. Yeah. The skills are, she doesn't have any new skills. She didn't learn any skills in that second. What she has, Is a belief that she can do it. And when you believe it, when you really just believe that you can do it, that's what allows you to swim. And when you think about it now, do you know how to swim? Yeah. So when you dive into the water, you don't think about that. You just know when you dive into the water, you can swim. You don't have any necessary swimming skills or anything like that. Or when you get on a bicycle, you get on, you know that you're gonna, unless you believe you can't because you've never gone out there and tried it and worked on it and done it. Told a story of a patient of yours who had that very problem, who said she didn't know how to ride a bicycle.
Yeah.
Gail, who came to me many years ago. And you know why she said she couldn't ride a bicycle? Because her mother wouldn't let her get on one.
Cop out.
Yeah, absolutely. And she had these beautiful big white teeth, and her, uh, mother had always told her, you could fall and break your teeth, and I wouldn't want that to happen to you. So here she was now in her 30s and, uh, telling me that she couldn't ride a bike, and she was in therapy. And, um, I said to her, okay, let's go. She said, go, where are we going? I said, well, I've got a bicycle downstairs and I'm gonna, uh, show you how to ride a bike. I'm gonna have you teach yourself how to do this. And she said, look, I didn't come here to pay you the kind of money that I'm paying you to have you teach me how to ride a bicycle. I came here to find out why I can't. I said, oh, well, you're gonna need another 30 seconds of therapy easy. Okay? The reason you can't is because you never got yourself on a bicycle. And until you do, you never will know how. And you just believe that you can't. Oh, that's the end of that. There's There's no more to talk about that. Now what we have to do is get you to get out there. And we went downstairs and I had a, it was a woman's bike and I've helped a lot of people to teach themselves how to ride a bike. And what you do when you teach, you help someone to teach themselves how to ride a bike, cuz you don't teach anybody how to ride a bike. Okay. Is you let them do it all themselves. You let them hold it, you let them balance it, you let them move with it. You let them put the pedal down and, and, and move it themselves. And you stand back. No, when you're ready, you know, and then you move it and you hold on for a second, then you put your foot back down and you, you practice it and practice and practice that all yourself, you know, and with just someone encouraging you. And before long, in just a matter of minutes, when I tell you it was minutes, and this woman had never been on a bicycle before, she rode like 2 blocks on a bicycle. She couldn't believe that she, she now had a belief. Being to me means Seeing the greatness and the uniqueness in you and never letting anybody else convince you to the contrary. When people ask me, come on, you're always talking about being up and you're always positive and so on. You mean to tell me that you're always that way? This is, I say, yeah, yeah, I really am. And it isn't because I'm out there doing something in an artificial way. It's an authentic response to my having, having gotten the junk. Out of me. And the junk is the way that I used to think, the way that I used to think. Think for a moment, if you can visualize right here, a clock, a big clock, and the hands on the clock go from 1 to 12. The clock starts right out here with the minute hand and it goes over towards the 3, the, uh, hour hand, minute hand. And that's the time in your life when you are moving away from yourself, from your true self. That's the time when you are trying to put other people down, trying to prove that you're bigger and better than somebody else, trying to make yourself right all the time as opposed to, uh, being with somebody else. It's like you're moving away and a lot of people spend a lot of time moving away from their true self cuz your true self is this little child. Is this beautiful little child inside of you that has only love and acceptance for everything in the world and no dis-ease, no absence of ease. You move away towards the 3, and then you move down here this way, and you're still moving away from yourself until you hit the 6. The 6 is the point in your life, symbolically, metaphorically here, when you are the furthest away from yourself that you can be. It's the low point in your life. It's the point where very many people break down, or many people break down their relationships, or they, they feel full of despair. They feel full of hatred, whatever it may be. And a lot of people die then. A lot of people are put into hospitals then. A lot of people have to really seek out therapy then and so on. And when you're at that 6, there's another part of the clock that goes from 6 to 12 that I think of as, uh, living in the light. And this is when, and see, this clock hand never can go back. It can't go back. It can only go this way. It only goes this way, as does life. It only goes this way forward in this period, this place between 6 and 12. That's when you start coming back to yourself. That's when, that's what enlightenment is. That's what, that's the pathway to enlightenment. When you send out that stuff that is destroying you, that is killing you in one way or another, and you move yourself back over here, and eventually you get yourself all the way back. This is the light over here. This is the place where you can't go back. You'd be tempted. You might be tempted to steal. You might be tempted to, to, to use anger. You might even slip a little bit and you catch yourself. I can think just not too long ago there was, uh, we, we, we got a problem with our sprinkler at, at, uh, in my home. One of the sprinkler heads is off. And if you've ever seen that happen, you get a gusher going up there. And I've been wanting to get that thing replaced for the longest time. And I'm walking outta the bank and there's a sprinkler head right there in, in front of the bank. Now I practically own this bank.
Okay.
So I mean, I go there every day and I do a lot of business with this bank. And I'm looking at this sprinkler head and I think, you know, all I have to do is just unscrew this thing. It wasn't on or anything. They'll replace it tomorrow morning. It's, it's 98 cents or whatever. So I actually get down there and I look and I start turning the sprinkler. And then I start thinking, do I want this karma? Do I, you know, do I want the, do I wanna steal? Do I wanna take, I know it's only a 99, and if I went into the bank, they'd probably give me one anyway if I asked them. And I turned it and then I just turned it back. And I said, if I want a sprinkler head, I'll go and buy one for myself. This doesn't belong to me. And it, and it was just like a split second of weakness there or whatever it was, but it illustrated to me that I can't go back there. I could never. And there was a time in my life when I could have done that. I can be absolutely frank with that. I could do that. Uh, I can't go back there anymore. That's where you start. That's the place to start. 'Cause when you get all of that out, when that's all gone, and I mean gone, and it only comes about as a result of the way that you think, So it's just changing around your approach to life, the way that you think in life. When that starts to go away, what you've become filled up with is what your natural self is, which is this loving, accepting, uh, not fighting the universe, but instead living in it and going with the flow and all of the kinds of clichés that you've heard a thousand times. It is, that's the metaphor there. And you see, every time you try to go back, can't do it. You can't do it. And the ingredients that make for a no-limit life are 5, in my opinion. The first is quality rather than appearances. You begin to change your thinking from appearances and how things look and how other people view me.
Okay.
Because every time you find yourself upset in life about anything that anyone else has said, what you're really saying is what you think of me is more important than what I think of me. All right? So you change from appearances to what I call quality thinking. Quality. What is the quality of my life rather than how does it appear to others? Now, do you tell yourself that because my friends don't like me, That, that means there's something wrong with me. Now that's, see, that's what you have to learn, that another person's opinion is just that. It's their opinion and that's all it is. Every time you are upset or your children are upset because of what somebody else says about them, including their peers, what you are really saying in that moment, and this is really important, what you're saying is, what you think of me is more important Than what I think of myself. And you must never give anybody that kind of power and control over you because they will always have it. The funny part about approval, for those of you who really want it and really— now I'm here to tell you that I like approval. I enjoy it. I find it one of the most exciting things in the world. I like it when people read my books. I love it when people applaud. I like it when people, uh, tell me nice things and all. I like approval. I'm the first one to admit it. What I don't do is I don't need approval. There's a big difference between wanting approval and needing approval. When you need approval, it means you become immobilized when you don't get it from making other people's opinions more important. Now, for those of you who say, yeah, but I want approval and I need it, and if I don't get it and so on, then understand this. The people who get The most approval in life are the ones who care the least about it. And the ones who get the least approval are the ones who are always going after it. So if you want approval in this paradoxical way that I'm talking about it, stop needing it. Stop concerning yourself about it. Ask yourself, who gets the most approval in life? Think of the person that gets the most approval and you'll see that that person couldn't care less what other people are thinking. They're so busy being, they don't have time to notice what their neighbors are doing. Thoreau said this, he said, if you advance confidently in the direction of your own dreams and endeavor to live the life which you have imagined, you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. What that means is that success is not something that you can get in life. Success is an inner process. Success is something that you bring to everything you do in your life. It isn't something you get out of what you do. And when you get that and you learn how to get the junk out and advance confidently doing what makes the most amount of sense to you based on your inner signals and the one issue of morality, which is you never interfere with anybody else's right to do the same. Each person has their own right to advance confidently in the direction of their own dreams. And when you violate that, you're violating the principle of the universe, the essence of the universe, which is cooperation and harmony. Then success will begin to chase you and it will come into your life and arrive in your life. In amounts that you never dreamt of before, that you never dreamt of. Things will start happening to you that you would never imagine before. I'm working on a book right now that's gonna be called You'll See It When You Believe It. And when you start believing in some of these principles, you'll start seeing things that you were blind to for so long when you were back here in the 2 and the 3 and the 4 and the 5. When you were moving away from yourself, as long as you're moving back towards your universal essence, your harmony with yourself, your cooperation with the rest, things will start happening in ways that you never dreamt of. Jung called it, uh, synchronicity. And we, it's, it's a term that we use to, to explain how unexplainable coincidences sort of happen in our life and how come these things happen. I'm gonna share a couple of those with you before we leave. The, the quality versus appearance in your life means that you get that inner candle flame working in a way that gives you quality independent of what other people think of you. Maslow, in defining self-actualizing, no-limit people, said they are independent of the good opinion of other people. Of the good opinion of other people, independent of it. They're so busy advancing confidently, doing the things that make sense and bringing success to changing their baby's diaper and bringing success to weeding their garden and bringing it to the job. They bring it on the airplane so that when they run into somebody who is, who is rude to them, a stewardess that is rude, they don't see it as an attack on them. It's just where they are and they send them love. Help them a little bit. You know, they're kind. When somebody wants to get in on the freeway and their, uh, one old temptation when they were on the 1 to the 6 side was to say, oh yeah, nobody's getting in front of me. I'm getting there first. It's like they slow down a little bit. They don't have all that type A stuff of having to beat somebody else and having to defeat somebody. It is, it's a new way of It's a way of quality where your harmony allows you to cooperate and you are a part of what this whole thing is about. New way of being quality rather than appearances. Another new way of being very important. Living your life on ethics rather than rules. Ethics rather than rules. All these rules, all these ways of having to do things. Somebody else dictates to them. Do you know that some of the most immoral acts in the world have been perpetrated in the name of the rules? These are the laws. What do you think Nazi Germany was all about? Everybody doing all these horrible things to other people. I'm only doing my job was the defense we all heard at Nuremberg. I was just doing my job. If it's an immoral rule, it's immoral to obey it. And self-actualizing people, as Maslow tells us, have rules inside of them that they could never obey, never disobey ever. And they have to do with ethics, how you treat people. How do you think we get to where we are now? You know who Rosa Parks was? The woman in the South, the Black woman in the South who said, not today. I'm not going to the back today. No way. I know what the rules are. The rules were all over the place. If you didn't need, if you needed a reminder, There were signs every place, colored in the back, white in the front. And she said, no, I'm sitting here. And that made all the difference. Ethics, not rules. When your children start disobeying rules that need to be disobeyed, don't be surprised. When I was in the service, they had a policy on Guam where I was stationed. which would not allow the Guamanian civilians to shop in the PXs and the Navy exchanges, but they did allow all other civilians to shop in the Navy exchanges and PXs. But if you were Guamanian, that is, if your skin was dark and your eyes were shaped a little different, then you couldn't. A clear outright violation. I was a serviceman. I was in the Navy. I was a communications, uh, cryptographer. They had a, a newspaper in the Guam Daily News and it said, an invitation to speak your mind. And it was a letter writing contest.
That's good.
And they offered $75 to the first prize winner. $75. This was 1961. That was a fortune to me. That was a month's pay in the Navy at that time, almost. So I entered the contest and I knew I would win it. I had already written a novel at that time, a whole novel I'd written while I was on Guam. I knew it wasn't gonna be a contest. Uh, I felt sorry for the other people entering it. I knew I was gonna win this. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that when you're in the service and you have an opinion and you don't submit it to the chain of command, that you can be court-martialed for that.
Oh, good.
So the headlines on next week's Guam Daily News were, US Sailor Assails Policy of Discrimination.
Yeah.
Big hot stuff.
All right.
And I was called before a vice admiral, commander, Naval Forces Marianas Islands, and threatened with a court martial because I had disobeyed the rules, even though the rule was immoral. There are lots of like that. And when I went in and they threatened me with a court martial, I told them this was my battle plan. They didn't have Xerox machines in those days, so I had to get a lot of carbon paper. I wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy, and I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy, and I wrote a letter. I was, my hometown was Detroit. I wrote a letter to the Detroit News and a letter to the Detroit Free Press telling them what was happening to me. as a result of just expressing my opinion about an immoral act that was going on over here on Guam. And I showed the naval, uh, uh, vice admiral my letters right there. I said, I've only sent the one to the president and the secretary of the Navy. These letters go to the newspapers across the country. There was one there to the New York Times as well, and the Los Angeles Times. It was, uh, and I just spread them out before him. I said, if you court-martial me or punish me in any way for this, then what's gonna happen is the world is gonna find out about this policy. And I'm prepared. I'm ready. I can handle it. And I was 20 years old at the time, or 21. Not only did I get a blessing from that, because all things come in blessings for you, I got out 90 days early. And they stamped on my record PI because the president took it up and sent it to the secretary. Must have. And I never heard from him, but I, uh, the PI on your record means political influence. And they don't like anybody with political influence in the military. And as soon as they saw that, they said, this is somebody we probably will be, uh, giving a discharge real soon. There was no court, there was no court martial. And in September of 1962, a brand new policy was initiated on Guam, which allowed any civilian to shop in the Navy exchanges. And it came about as a result of someone saying, these rules are immoral and therefore it's immoral to obey them. New ways of being ethics rather than rules. And when your kids wanna know why, how come these rules are so stupid? How come we have to do this? Encourage them to change them. My mother always did that. She would have to help me, uh, get out of the, out of the messes that I got myself into because I, I, I did it in my impetuous youth.
I would just, when they would say to me, what's more important, your job or school?
I was just honest.
I said, my job, of course.
That's how I felt in those days. But what you do put out in the world is exactly what's coming back to you. And if you find things coming back to you that you don't like and don't understand. Don't ask yourself why these things are coming to you. Ask yourself what you're doing to make them come back to you. And when you start putting the responsibility on yourself, you'll start seeing dramatic changes. Dramatic changes. A new way of being instead of ethics, instead of rules, ethics. A new, another new way of being instead of looking all your life For achievements and externals, try living your life on knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Knowledge instead of achievement for the sake of knowledge. Being in a, in a context in which you don't have to collect a lot of merit badges. You don't have to collect a lot of, a lot of, uh, awards and other people's, uh, a value judgment that you go to school or you go out into the world or you read or whatever it is you do because it makes sense to you, not because of what somebody else is going to put on a transcript or where you're gonna appear in a class list. We need to help our children to understand and value the importance of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and doing things that make sense rather than taking the easy way. Knowledge rather than always trying to achieve. We are in an achievement-oriented society, which tells us that we evaluate and judge a human being based upon how many achiev— achievements he has. But most of the people who get caught up in that trap and are always in this circle of trying to get ahead, trying to always get ahead, their reward for that almost always is higher blood pressure.
Ulcers.
Early deaths, and even things like cancer, we're beginning to find out, are related to the kinds of stresses that we have. And remember, it's a perfect universe. There's no stress in it. There's only people thinking stressful thoughts. And when you put that pressure on yourself to always achieve and get ahead of the other guy, you miss what it's really all about. There's nothing wrong with goals. It's falling in love with them. That's the problem. It's not being able to be flexible and be altered. If you have a goal to get here, to get $100,000 in the bank, to get to this promotion, to get 2 cars in your garage, whatever it is that your goal is, and you're on your way to that and you're always working at the goal, all of this stuff on your way to the goal is called striving. And that's what you learn. Striving. Striving's a very low-level place to be. When you get to your goal, because all you've ever known is striving, you will just always suffer from this disease called more. You will just upgrade your goal. of $200,000, 4 cars and 2 houses and another wife and a younger one and, and all of these kinds of things. If you have a goal and you understand that every step along the way is a present moment to enjoy and to live, then the goal won't become any obsession. I don't have any goals in my life. People ask me, where are you gonna be 5 years from now? What are you gonna be doing? What's next for you? I just, uh, I remember what Lincoln said, who to me was like the greatest person who ever sat in that White House. He said, I never had a policy. He said, I just tried to do what made the greatest amount of sense each and every day of my life as I sat there as the President of the United States. And I think there's, there's something really significant in that, that you don't have to get it all planned out and follow a certain pattern and do it a certain way. If you just sort of trust your inner instincts and go with that and live each moment. The gold stuff will all take care of itself. But if you're sacrificing and pushing your life aside and, and, uh, suffering on your way to trying to get someplace, you'll never get there. It will always elude you because once you get there, you'll just have to upgrade it. And that's cuz that's all you'll know. Nowness is that purest form of sanity, living in this moment and enjoying it, and all the rest of it will sort of work its way out. Another new way of being for me Is to think of yourself in terms of personal authority rather than being an authoritarian. Personal authority. A person who has authority never needs to dominate anyone else ever. Dominating doesn't become necessary in business. You can have authority. The people who have the most authority are the ones who listen the most and the ones who are the most conscientious about what do other people have to say. A person in a relationship who has to dominate somebody else and has to make the other person submissive shows that they don't have authority because they're getting their power not from within for themselves, but on the basis of who they can control. And that never lasts. That never lasts. The only thing that lasts is having inner power, if you will. Know thyself. That's what Shakespeare said. Know thyself. The more you know yourself, the more you, the more you become honest with yourself. Uh, honesty becomes just a way of life. No, I don't think the world necessarily does, but you can't run your world. You can't run your world based upon what the rest of the people in the world want or don't want. To me, honesty is like, it's a karma that goes out into the world. How people treat you in the world is their karma. How you react is yours. And what, when you react to it with dishonesty, that's what you're putting out into the world. Dishonesty. And when you put dishonesty out into the world, that's what's gonna come back to you. Because what goes out is what comes back. That all as you sow, so shall you reap. I mean, it's, it's in every great, uh, institution that there is in the world, whether, whether it's a religion or a philosophy or whatever. What you put out is what comes back. Whatever you plant is what you reap. what you're gonna get back. And the more that you put out honesty, just because it's what you are, because you are being honesty, you're not trying to be honest, you are just being honesty, then that's what will come back to you on a regular basis. And when it doesn't, you'll just see that as another test for you to pass. And finally, a 5th way of being that is new for me, It has become a way of life. It's called serenity instead of acquisitions. The more you try to acquire, the more you try to get, the more you try to collect in your life and evaluate yourself on the basis of that, the less serenity you're gonna have. More is less. It's almost a secret of the universe. Serenity means inner peace. It means that you can, uh, find joy in every moment that you have in your life instead of always looking for it. It means that, um, while you are, uh, uh, driving along the countryside, you know, and seeing, uh, instead of saying, oh, this is, I'm on my way to this point, that you can open your eyes and see it with new eyes. See, see the rolling mountains, see the grass. See the deer, see the sky. See, you can just stop wherever you are in this second, wherever you are, and just look around you. And you can begin to appreciate just your, your surroundings and your environment. Then you can begin to appreciate the people that are in your life, and even the ones that are negative and, and that you're having the most difficulty with. You can practice a new way of being with them, which is sending them love, sending them flowers, send 'em books, send 'em a tape, send them something, and just see what kind of reaction that you get. Super emotional health is just an attitude. An attitude is everything. I want to, uh, summarize these new ways of being and, and give you the most important, uh, ingredient on the path as we leave. I said that, uh, it's quality in your life to be focusing on rather than appearances, and it's ethics rather than rules, and it's knowledge rather than achievement all the time. And it's being personally an, an authority on yourself rather than authoritarian and trying to be dominant, dominating someone else or to be dominated. And serenity, which is the name of my little girl, my youngest daughter Serena. Um, rather than acquisitions and accumulations and trying to prove yourself that way. And when you get that serenity, which comes from the way that you think always, then You will replace all of the other junk that keeps you back here between 6 and 1 on that clock. And once you pass it, once you get past it, you'll never ever be able to go back because the light, living in the light is a way of, it's a way of being that if you're not there, you don't get it yet. But once you see it and once it begins to take over your life, you can never go back. That be— that is your purpose. It isn't, your purpose isn't to try to be loving. Your purpose is to be love and only have that to give away. Well, but there's one other ingredient and it's really crucial. Forgiveness is the vital ingredient on the path of enlightenment. And if you don't know how to do it, then practice sending out love. Take the person or the people that you're having conflict conflict with any place in your life, send them something. You don't have to even do it physically. Just send them something that comes from inside. And what's inside is how you choose to think. And if you can make that love and do that, and that is to me the test, not whether you can love someone when they smell good, when they do everything that you're supposed to, But whether you can love someone who has sent you hate or anguish in your life and send it back, you don't have to forget. You don't have to go back, but you gotta get it outta you because it is blocking you and holding you back. And when I said you'll see it when you believe it, all my life I had wanted to write fiction, a parable. 3, 4 years ago, I decided to go off to Hawaii. to Maui, to Kaanapali Beach, and to write. Now, the books that had made the most difference in my life were The Little Prince, Candide, Siddhartha, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Gulliver's Travels, parables, teaching parables, stories that can tell a message. I went over to Maui and I sat down on the beach and I'd been talking about writing this. I'd been talking about doing this and it was something that, and I have a little girl and her name is Skye, S-K-Y-E. I decided to reverse the letters in her name, E-Y-K-S, and put an I in there, which symbolizes The self. Ikes. And I just created this parable of a woman whose name is Ikes who lives on another planet. The planet is Uranus, and it's a duplicate mirror image of Earth, only Ikes can only see things as they are, not as we would like them to be. And therefore people are neurotic on Uranus because they have to be. She gives the anxiety attack report, if you will, because anxiety really does attack over there and tells About anxiety coming in on the weekends and so on. Well, my visitor in my parable goes to Uranus, meets Icarus. She cannot understand, as he describes Earth, why people would be neurotic by choice on Earth. Why would anybody be unhappy or depressed or miserable when they don't have, when anxiety doesn't attack and when elevators really don't scare you? And when, if you want a complex on Uranus, if you wanna give a complex to your wife, you go to the store and buy one. And she said, what happened? Well, my husband gave me a complex. You know, and it's true. Whereas on Earth, if you have a complex, it's because you've chosen to have one.
She can't figure it out.
Okay? So she comes here, observes our people, and begins to see the secrets of the universe and gives us these secrets, talks to the top leaders in our field. And that was my parable. And I wrote it and she gives all of these wonderful secrets, some of which I've been talking about here today. But what I wanna tell you is that my wife gave me a license plate and the license plate says Icas. Okay? It's a vanity plate. And I was pumping gas on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And a little man from Greece came up to me and he said, what means this? Efjes? Uh, which is how you say that in Greek. And I said, well, that's just a word. It's my daughter's name spelled backwards. It's a parable that I wrote. He said, no. He said, in Greek, that's a word. I said, what could that word be? He said, it means Best wishes for all. You'll see it when you believe it. The great big erroneous zone, the cosmic erroneous zone. If you get this one, you'll have it and understand it all. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.
We live in a, uh, Celebrity-obsessed world, don't we? Look at me. Notice me. The Tao teaches something completely the opposite. Listen to the 66th verse of the Tao. Water again. The sea stays low, and because the sea stays low, all of the rivers and all of the streams Empty into it because it stays humble, because it stays in that place of just allowing everything to come to you. He was trying to teach us the important lesson of letting what we know is coming come to us. I practice this so much more now in my life than I did at one time. I can remember years ago. I was, uh, I had written a book called Your Erroneous Zones back in the '70s, and, um, it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for something like 27 months. And each many weeks it would be number 1, and then it would go down to number 3, and then it would go to number 2 and down to 7 and all of that. And I was doing The Tonight Show in those days.
Mm-hmm.
On a regular basis. And, uh, so many of the other shows, the Merv Griffin and, uh, Phil Donahue and Dinah Shore. I became like a regular on the Dinah Shore. I was like, you know, hobnobbing with Burt Lancaster folks and, you know, just, uh, and, um, what you do is you call and, uh, find out where you appear on the, uh, on the bestseller list for the following week. On Wednesday. So you call up on Wednesday, not for the Sunday coming up, but for the following week. And I called home and my ego was pretty strong and I was very much into a lot of notice me. I, I really believe that true nobility is, is not about being better than anyone else. Now it's, it's about being better than you used to be. And I think I'm better than I used to be. And just about, I mean, I know that I'm better than I used to be in every quality or every characteristic that I hold to be valuable. Um, but in those days I was into notice me and I called home and I had trained my wife to, uh, call the New York Times. She had this special number that she could call and with a certain code and she could find out where I was going to appear on the bestseller list the following week. So I called her up and I said, uh, where am I on the bestseller list next week? You know, I was, out in California doing something. And she said, uh, you're not on the bestseller list. I said, what are you talking about? I was number 1 on the bestseller list last week. I said, my, even my voice changed when I said, what do you mean I'm not on the bestseller list? She said, you're not on the bestseller list. I'm sorry. She said, your book is on the bestseller list. Big distinction there, isn't it?
Yeah.
Between believing that this is me and recognizing that, uh, you can let go a little bit of, of that, of that. Listen to, uh, verse 66 of the Tao. Why is the sea king of 100 streams? Because it lies below them. Humility gives it its power. That's a very important principle to understand. And I live on the ocean right next to it. It's my front yard. And always I watch it to learn something from this thing called the ocean, which is the most powerful source of life that we have on the planet. Without it, there's no life on this planet. And because it stays low, so what does this have to say to us? Do you have the capacity to get past that ego need to always be saying, notice me, look how important I am? I mean, there's been a proliferation of this lately with this celebrity silly stuff, isn't it? I mean, CNN is doing, you know, full hour shows on, uh, on silly little things about what happened to this particular celebrity or what happened to that celebrity and The celebrity's never even done anything. And it's, uh, there's all of this talk about it and all of the new magazines. I mean, and you look, you go into through an airport and you look on the newsstand and all the same photos just with different magazines. I don't even know what, what the names of all of them are, but there's like this huge market now that we have for people to get into a state of notice me, notice me, notice me. And how much Do we train our young people, particularly in our schools and so on, that the one who is the star is the one who gets the most attention? The one who is, uh, the most important and the most valuable is the one that has, uh, the most people liking them and so on. This constant obsession with needing to be noticed when in fact what I have found for myself is the The happiest moments of my life are when I can do it low and slow and not have anybody out there even know what I'm doing. To be able to, I mean, Louise never would have, uh, advertised the fact of some of the things I talk about with her generosity. She does it anonymously. It's almost always done in those ways.
No, look at me, look and notice me, how important I am, and so on.
So much to learn from that kind of wisdom, from that kind of inner connection to the Tao, the ability and the willingness to say, to do it anonymously, to say that you can just get done almost anything that you want to get done if you don't become obsessed with taking credit for it. Remember the movie The Magnificent Obsession?
Yeah.
It was a movie made back, I think, in the '50s, and it was really about what was the magnificent obsession. It was the ability to be able to give anonymously. What is Alcoholics Anonymous? It is everybody stays anonymous. Nobody has a title. There's not even anybody in charge. There's nobody. There's no leaders of this. There's no president. There's no vice president.
There's no organization.
There's no, it's just, here's, here's a group of people who just want to help other people whose lives are outta control. So here's a meeting place.
And you come and some—
one day somebody will, uh, will chair it, and then somebody else another day will chair it. And one of the things I found when I attend one of these meetings, um, is that I, I feel— you'll see so many people who are downtrodden, who feel as if their life has passed them by, who look like they don't have any teeth, they haven't shaved, they're, they're dirty, they're God in disguise. Mother Teresa was asked the question about what she does when she was in Calcutta, and she said, every day, every day, I see Jesus Christ in all of his distressing disguises.
All of his distressing disguises.
That you can see this source, you can see the Tao, you can see it when, particularly in those who are The most obscure, the most, uh, isolated from everyone else. And whenever I go to one of those meetings and I hear people get up and they tell their stories, uh, they, I, I always, I feel that, I feel there's so much presence of the source of God, of spirit, of Lao Tzu, of the, of the sort of Tao, whatever you want to call it, in one of those meetings than I've ever felt. in any church. I've, I've never felt the presence of it more. And I encourage you, any of you watching this right now, go to one of those meetings. You don't have to be an alcoholic.
You don't have to.
And I'm not an alcoholic. I don't call myself an alcoholic. I was never out of control. I drank, but I wasn't outta control. And I, uh, but I still go to those meetings. I have people in my own family that have struggled with addiction. And I go with them and I sit there and I listen to those stories and I just, I get shivers down my back when I think about how beautiful it is to be in the presence of people. All they want to do is help each other. There's a movie called My Name Is Bill W. James Woods played, and Jim Carrey, James Garner is in it. And, uh, he, his life just got totally outta control with addictions, totally outta control. And then he went to a, uh, uh, he, he, he, he went to one of these meetings and he began to realize, and he said, we can, we can actually take these, uh, these people and all we have to do is, all we have to do is love them. All we have to do is— and he's so excited about the concept of being able to go out there and, and offer it. And I keep referring to Louise because she's such a hero to me. Um, there was a time back in the '80s when our president wasn't even able to say the word AIDS, was he? I mean, he could come up and here was this lady who, before this thing became the worldwide phenomenon that it is, was having meetings in her own house and, and going and, and bringing these people, these downtrodden people who had been labeled outcasts in society, and offering them a place to learn how to love each other and to care for each other. This was long before there was any celebrity status associated with trying to end this horrible crisis that our country has and our world has, has had. There was, uh, James Wood, so excited about the idea of we can create a place where we're anonymous. Nobody has to know anything about us. We don't have to say our names.
We don't have to say anything.
We just have to come there and we can help each other. And before Before that happened, everybody who got outta control with addictions, particularly with alcohol, would, uh, would die. There was no cure. There was no cure. And where did they find their cure? They found it in being anonymous. They found it in being obscure. They found it in having no organization. They found it in having no elected representative. They found it in having no rules. There are no rules. You just come and we care. If you've been one day or one hour sober, or even if you're drunk, you come, we care about you, and you are not that alcohol. Who you are is this divine soul. In the 36th verse of the Tao Te Ching, it says, the gentle outlast the strong, the obscure outlast the obvious. Try to become a little more obscure. A little less interfering, a little less notice me, a little less, you know, one of the specific kinds of things that you can do is just as you're about, when somebody else is talking, just as you're about to interject what you've been thinking about for the whole time, waiting for them to stop talking, just as you to just stop and to bite your tongue and say, tell me more.
Yeah.
Or that's very interesting.
I have never heard that point of view before.
Even if they Totally, completely disagree with everything that you stand for, to be, to be willing to listen, to be able to stop. Practice it. I practiced it when I did these verses of the Tao. I practiced it every single day while I was working on that, just staying obscure. And for me, that's not always so easy because of just being recognized wherever I go. And if I saw someone who was about to recognize me, I would just put my head down. I would just walk a little bit past them like Right now, I just want to be anonymous. Right now, I want to be obscure. The Tao says storms always end. Verse 23, fierce winds don't blow all morning. A downpour of rain doesn't last all day. Who does this? Heaven and earth. You're already connected to everything you want Or need. It will come to you at the exact perfect time, as the rivers and the streams come to the ocean at the perfect time and place. You gotta trust. You gotta know it's going to come to you.
You don't have to chase after it.
You can become a little less obsessed with your ego and your self-importance and who you are and what you've done. And you can get so much more done.
And you know what?
It's the most peaceful and sweet, delicious way. It's like the song that Cecilia was singing about the rose. There is an energy in the universe. There is something that is in each and every one of us, and it's also in the universe, and you are connected to it in a way that is often, uh, perceived to be, uh, Oh, aloof from us because it's invisible, because it's in the world of what we call spirit, the world that is not material. And, uh, I would like to suggest that you suspend your disbelief, allow yourself to know that you're not a human being here having a spiritual experience, but that it's the other way around, that you're a spiritual being having a human experience. And the quality of your human experience is really much more dependent upon how you use this invisible intelligence and how you connect to this energy. And once you have an awareness that you can never be separate from it, that you and it, and whatever you call it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you call it God, if you call it divine presence, If you call it soul, if you call it spirit, if you call it consciousness, if you call it Christ consciousness, you can call it Buddha consciousness. You can call it Louise, you can call it Edna, you can call it Ralph. Alan Watts once said that you can't get wet from the word water. It isn't the word that allows you to experience water, and whatever it is that you call it is something that is Distinct from what it is. When I was walking in here this evening on these beautiful grounds, I saw some people looking at the flowers and the different plants that were growing. And as they were looking at them, there was one person who was obviously an expert, a botanist of some kind, and he was trying to explain to each one of the people what the name was, the technical name for each one of the flowers. And I was watching that and thinking, it doesn't matter what you call it. Can't you enjoy, look at that thing, it's orange and it just came out of nowhere. There's something very profound about enjoying it and, and being there with it rather than being obsessed with labeling it. There was a very famous Danish theologian, his name was Søren Kierkegaard. He once said that once you label me, you negate me. Once you place a label on me and, and put me into a compartment or a category of some I must then become what it is that you have labeled me to be, so that we want to be able to live our lives and to practice principles of higher awareness without being so consumed with what I call ordinary human awareness. And ordinary human awareness is just the recognition or the belief system that I am a human being. Maybe I'm having a spiritual experience. I'm not quite sure, but higher human awareness, what is sometimes in the East called Siddhi awareness. In the West, it's been called higher consciousness or Christ consciousness. There's many names for it, but when you get beyond just knowing yourself as this body and this personality and this thing that you inhabit and begin to realize that who you are is That which was never born and can never die. When you recognize your eternal self. Now, that's what this program is really about. It's really about recognizing the power, the energy, the capacity to be able to do what it says in some of the most holy books that you've ever read, that even the least among you can do all that I have done and even greater things. And that's not just empty words. From Holy Scriptures. That's a very powerful lesson that each and every one of us can practice and live every day. What I'd like to suggest to you, and what this program is really about, is that there are higher levels of awareness that are available to us, a level of awareness that allows us to do things like, and it may sound a bit strange, but to manage the coincidences of our lives. To be able to place our attention on what it is that we would like to create for ourselves in our lives, to literally have the power to know that if I think about it and I keep it there and I keep that picture firm within me, that there is an energy, a source, a capacity within me that is in the universe and that is also in me, and that I can Use this energy, that I can manage it. There are many ways to get the things that we want for ourselves in our lives, but basically it all begins with how we choose to think. As you think, so shall you be. 7 little words that I think are perhaps the most important things that we can learn and master in our lives. This old proverb notion that I become what I think about all day long. And once you know that what you think about is what expands, you start getting real careful about what you think about. You don't allow your thoughts to be on anything that you don't want or that you wouldn't want to have manifest or show up for you in your life. Emerson said, the ancestor to every action Is a thought. And you can look at every spiritual tradition, whether it's Eastern or Western, whether it's ancient or modern, whether it's civilized, quote, or uncivilized, quote, whether it's tribal. And there is in all of these persuasions this idea that inside each and every one of us, in a place that is not Material, in a place that has no dimensions, in a place that has no boundaries, that in each and every one of us, we have this power and we have this intelligence, and you can never see it. I've often said that when you die, if you're gonna die and 5 minutes before you're ready to leave, they weigh your body, and let's say it weighs Oh, let's pick a good number. 150 pounds. All right. And then life leaves your body and they weigh your body instantly after you're dead and it still weighs 150 pounds so that your body weighs the same alive or dead before it begins to deteriorate. And if that's the case, then your life This thing that leaves your body and your body still weighs the same is weightless.
Your life is weightless.
You can't put a dimension on it. You can't put a measure on it. Who you are is that life, and that life is not in the dimension of material. It's like if I wanna wiggle my finger, I just have to have a thought. And the thought says, I think I'm gonna wiggle my finger, and then I do this and you say, well, that's really no big deal, but it really is a big deal because there's something invisible in here that says, I'm gonna wiggle my finger. I've never seen that. I've never been able to, you can't, you can put that under an x-ray. You can try to measure that and find out what it is in there that allows you to say, I'm gonna wiggle my finger, and you can never find it. It's not in this world, if you will. So I can do all the scientific studies, and what I can do when I do these scientific studies is I can find the command center inside of me that a lot— and I can go to the brain and I can point to a specific point, and scientists can do this and say, there's the command center which allows you to have a thought. I think I'm gonna wiggle my finger. But there's no computer and there's no scientists and there's no technology that can ever allow us To go inside and say, there's the commander in the command center. Hmm.
Can't find it.
And that commander in the command center, that weightlessness, is the part of us that we just don't pay enough attention to. And what I'd like to suggest here this evening is that once you start becoming aware of the power of thought, And if you look around, just look around you at everything that you see. It all began with a thought. We become what we think about, and that is probably one of the most important principles in learning to manifest. But in my mind, as I think about this idea of getting what you really want and being able to attract it into your life, what, what, what we have to look at is Basically the obstacles that we have conditioned ourselves. And you notice I say that we have conditioned ourselves because I have never believed that we need to be putting the responsibility on someone else. If you're conditioned, it's because you have allowed yourself to become that. And if we are conditioned, if we conditioned ourselves to believe certain kinds of things, and one of the things that we kind of believe and hang onto and, and live with is this whole idea that, um, all of the things that happened to me in my past are what are keeping me from doing what I'd like to do today. So we hang onto these things and we fill ourselves with blame. We say, I'm the middle child, I'm the youngest child, I'm the oldest child, you know, I'm an only child. Any one of those is a great excuse. You know, if you're the youngest child, You can say, well, you know, I never, how could I be making decisions for myself and be a fully, fully, a fully functioning person today when I always had somebody else telling me what to do my whole life? How could I think for myself? If you're the oldest child, you can simply say to yourself, well, how could I be expected to think for myself? I always had to think for somebody else. I was always doing it for somebody else. And that leaves the middle child, you know, the classic identity crisis. Oh, poor me. My mother didn't even know my name. She's always calling me by this one's name or that one's name, so I don't know where I fit in. So that takes care of everybody except the only child. And of course, the only child, well, your parents looked at you and said, we won't be doing that again, right? You have to live with that. I don't, huh? So everybody with their birth order or with their mother liked their sister better, or that we had enough or we didn't have enough, or We had too much, or we lived in the north, we lived in the south. I'm too tall, I'm too short. I've got too much hair. I don't have enough hair. It's falling out. It's not falling out. Whatever it is, we all have these excuses. And I call all of these things that we hang onto and use to keep ourselves from reaching these higher places in our lives, the wake. I call it the wake. And the wake Is, uh, comes from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time, and it was a very powerful story. He said, your life is like a boat and it's heading up the river at say 40 knots. All right? And as it's going, you are somehow able to metaphorically stand on the stern, the back of the boat, and look down into the water. Now there goes your life in this direction. And you're standing here and you're looking down into the water and you ask yourself these 3 questions. The first question, what is the wake?
What is it?
What is this thing that you see? And the answer, the wake is the trail that is left behind.
That's what it is.
Nothing more, nothing less. It's the trail that is left behind. Second question to ask yourself in this little metaphor. What's driving the boat? What's making this thing go in this direction? The answer, the present moment energy that's being generated by the engine and nothing more. That's the only thing that's making the boat go in this direction. And in this little scene, this means it's the present moment thoughts that I have And how I am using them that is making my life go in this direction and nothing more. Because the third question is the most important and powerful question. And I've ever, ever since I heard it, I've always thought about this whenever I have a tendency to look back here and blame something. Is it possible for the wake to drive the boat? That is, can a trail That is left behind make a boat go in this direction? And of course, the answer to that is no, it can't. It's just a trail that is left behind. And in that trail, there are an enormous number of things. And every one of us has a wake, and we have a whole lot of stuff in it. And one of the problems that we have is that we have a tendency to look at the wake.
Mm-hmm.
And all of the stuff that's in it to explain why it is my life isn't working the way I would like it to work. So that, um, you can take a look at the experiences of your life. I look at the experiences of my life and the experiences of my life. I spent some years in, uh, a series of foster homes. People have said to me, oh, living in a foster home, that must have been terrible. I said, no, it wasn't terrible at all. When you're 6 years old, you don't wake up every day and say, oh my God, I'm living in a foster home. Isn't this awful? Poor me. How come me and nobody else? You don't do that. You don't do that till you're 40. And when you're 40 and your life isn't working and you're bankrupt and you're a drug addict and, and, uh, and you're falling, your relationships are all falling apart and your family's leaving you. And you say, why is this happening to you? You say, what do you expect from me? I had to live in a foster home. My mother liked my sister better. We were too this, we were too. And so it's like we take a look at all of these things in our way. And I'm not saying here that you shouldn't be in touch with your past and all of the things that are back there, but to use it as excuses for why you can't get where you'd like to get today. Is something that you, if you do that, you will never get to this place that I'm talking about in this program, which is this place that I call higher awareness, way beyond ordinary human awareness. One of the most powerful lessons that you can ever learn, I had to learn as a young man. My own father was a man who, uh, walked away. He left. He left home when I was just a baby. Left my mother who's sitting right here, 107 years old. Is that what you— no, you're not 107. 82 years old though. And, and with 3 little boys. And all I had ever heard when he walked out about this person that my older brothers told me about, and that, uh, when my mother got her family back together again when I was 9 years old and, and did all that she could. to, uh, to make a family again with all the hardships. This is a man who never made a phone call, who never sent a penny, who spent some time in prison, who was an alcoholic, who died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 49 and was buried in a pauper's grave in Biloxi, Mississippi. And it wasn't until I went to his grave And was able to stand there. And I used to dream about this man and have this enormous hatred for this person whom I had never seen, just based upon what he had done to my own mother and to my brothers and so on, and all of the stories that I had heard and all the research that I had done. And I ended up at his grave 10 years after he had died. When I finally found out that he was dead, it was on the 27th of August. It was 1974, and what I did transformed my life. What I did is I believe I was sent there by God, or whatever you wanna call that divine spirit, that divine presence. And my life at that time wasn't working. I was overweight. My relationships weren't working. My writing wasn't working. There were a lot of things that weren't going well for me in my life at that time. Not badly, but they weren't going at the level that I knew I was capable of getting to because I was filled with this hatred, this anger, this bitterness. And so what I did is I stood there on his grave, on this little marker in the ground, and I said, from now on, I send you love. I forgive you. Mark Twain said that forgiveness is the fragrance That the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. And once I let go of that anger and that hatred and all of my attachment to the bonding that I had done with these wounds and let go of that and cleared that out of my life, my writing began to take place at a much higher level. In fact, I wrote Erroneous Zones in very, very short time after that. I began to get myself back in shape. I began to eat better. I began exercising, keeping my, uh, got my weight down. And the people that were supposed to come into my life, like my beautiful wife who sits here with me this evening, and all of our children, some of whom are here this evening, all of it was allowed to flow when I released that, that energy of negativity. And blame and hatred. They say that you never die from a snakebite. It isn't the bite, and you can't be unbitten. It's in the wake. What kills you is the venom that continues to pour through you long after the bite has taken place. And that's something we have control over and we can change. And I'd like to suggest that what happens is that many of us bond ourselves to these wounds of our past. If I were to cut my hand, just cut it and watch it, my nature says close up the wound and I just have to watch it. And there's no doctor out there, there's no medicine out there that's gonna heal that wound. There's something, there's a healing stream that I am connected to that will allow that wound to heal. So my nature says, close up the wounds. Don't bond to them. Don't hang onto them.
Close 'em up.
But supposing I say to myself, oh no, you don't. There's no way I'm gonna let you close up. You see, if I can keep you open and I can go to you and say, look at this. Say, what happened? Well, look at this cut I've got. Oh, you poor thing.
Look at that.
It seems to be getting worse. It's getting infected. Isn't that terrible? And if you practice this kind of a mentality, when your nature says close up the wound, but you keep it open, before long you lose your hand. And after that, you'll lose your arm and the whole organism will be destroyed if you don't let your nature take over. And your nature also says, close up the wounds of your past, close them up. And oftentimes we ignore our nature. I had a great teacher that came into my life through his writing. His name was Nisargadatta Maharaj, lived in India. up until the mid-1980s. And he wrote something called I Am That, which was very powerful and influential in my life. And one of the things that he talked about when he was asked the question, what's the difference between, say, a saint or a highly functioning human being, a spiritual master, a spiritual teacher, and the rest of us, is that they have unconditional love in them. And you don't, or we don't. And he said, no. He said, saints have unconditional love in them, and so do you. He said, the difference between ordinary human awareness and higher awareness people is that they have nothing else inside of them.
That's all they have.
And it's almost like we have to learn how to get that in ourselves. To be able to, well, I always like to use a metaphor of an orange. I love the orange. Perhaps living in Florida is why, but an orange is a simple metaphor. You take this orange and you squeeze it as hard as you can squeeze it, and you ask yourself, what will come out? And what comes out when you squeeze an orange?
Orange juice.
Orange juice. Never, no matter how many times you squeeze it, will apple juice come out. There's no mistakes. You'll never get grapefruit juice outta this thing ever. The only thing you'll ever get out of it is orange juice. And the next question is, why? Why, when you squeeze an orange as hard as you can squeeze it, does orange juice come out? And I asked that question up in Toronto one time. There's a little girl sitting right in the front row. She said, that's dumb. It's a, she said, that's what's inside. It has to come out. I said, well, that's the answer. You are really smart. And she smiled and she thought that was great. But that's the truth. The reason that orange juice comes out when you squeeze it is because that's what's inside. Now you extend the metaphor and someone squeezes you. That is, someone says something about you that you don't like. Someone behaves towards you in a way that you find offensive. Somebody does something or says something to you that you feel hurt by, and out of you comes anger, hatred, Bitterness, tension, fear, anxiety, stress. And immediately you say, the reason that comes out of me is because of how he said it, or the way that she said that, or because they did that. But the truth is, the reality is that what comes out is what's inside. And if you don't like what's inside, you can change it. Now, if you ask me, how does orange juice get inside of an orange? I would say, I don't know. I can't figure it out. That's a mystery to me. I just enjoy the oranges of my life and give God the credit for that. A lot of people think that other things make them the way they are. They will blame their past, they'll blame their parents, they'll blame the economy, they'll blame the Ayatollah, they'll blame somebody for things that are going wrong in their life. And one of the favorite things that we have to blame for why I'm upset at a particular moment is something called traffic. Traffic made me upset. And I've always reminded myself when I'm in a jam or when I'm on the freeway and I'm trying to get someplace, that traffic doesn't care, that you have within you the opportunity in this moment to really work on these things that are perhaps debilitating or creating anxiety or stress in your life.
That these are tests, these are opportunities for you. Traffic doesn't care.
Your anger is your choice, and you can always choose to be, to be happy, angry, depressed, miserable, upset, or you can choose to be fulfilled and do something positive in this moment.
It's always up to you.
I'd like to give you what I think of as the great spiritual teachings of many various Persuasions. There's a story that summarizes it. It's the story of what I call the 4 philanthropists in a village. The conquerors had come through and they had taken all of the men, or many of the men who were warriors at the time, and they had placed them into this prisoner of war camp right in the village. And many of the villagers knew that their compatriots, Were imprisoned. And the first philanthropist was a person who had great wealth, and he went to the people who had the prison and were in charge of it, and he said to them, I understand the men are not able to have fresh water and cold water. I would like to donate all of my earnings and everything that I have to purifying the water for them and making sure That all of them will not be sick. And he was granted that, and he felt like he had fulfilled his destiny, that he had done what he was here for. The second philanthropist discovered that the men were sleeping on rocks and that they were cold at night. They didn't have blankets. And he took all of his funds and he said to them, I would like to provide bedding and blankets for the people so that they will be comfortable when they sleep at night. And he was granted that right, and he donated His money for this purpose. And again, he felt that he was fulfilling his destiny. The 3rd philanthropist discovered that the food that they were eating was inadequate, that they were just given, uh, beans and, and, uh, and water and some bread. And so he said, I own a farm and I'd like to grow all of my food and I'd like to take this food to all of these prisoners. And he was granted that right. And all 3 of these great philanthropists in the village felt that they had really completed their mission for why they were here. But the 4th philanthropist was a saint. He was living not at ordinary human awareness, but at higher consciousness levels. And he went and he found out where the keys were, and he went to the prison at night and he Released all of the prisoners. And this little metaphorical story really tells us that when we are living at ordinary human awareness, there's nothing wrong with those who are out there who can help us to suffer in comfort.
All right?
And many of us have learned to do that and accept that and say, all right, as long as I'm comfortable, even if I'm suffering, it's okay. But there are those who have keys. And those keys can open the prisons. One of the great teachers in my life was Carlos Castaneda, and Castaneda talked about his teacher who was what they call an nagual, a, and a Native American term that, uh, refers to, uh, all that is knowable. And he, His teacher told him that your life is like being born into a, uh, a room, a mansion, if you will, that has 1,000 rooms, but you're born into one room. And this one room is called daily human awareness. And the only way you can get in is through conception and birth. You're in. And the only way you can get out, we are taught, Is to die. So we spend our lives in this mansion in one room, even though there's 999 other rooms. We don't know how to get out into those rooms unless we die. So we wait to die. And what his teacher told him is, I can teach you how to get out of the room of daily awareness and into the other 999 rooms. And if you stay with me and learn all that I have to give you, I can teach you how to get out of the house altogether without having to die. And what we have to do in order to get to that place where we can take the keys and unlock the self-imposed prisons or the prisons that we have given ourselves on the basis of what we have come to Believe is our limitations, what we can and can't do. We have to let go of that, and I call it rewriting our agreement with reality. We literally have to make a, a, a whole new contract with what it is that I perceive to be what is possible for me. And in order to do that, we have to shift out of the things that we have come to believe in and everything that you came to this program watching tonight that you believe in was handed to you by someone else outside of you, was handed to you by the experiences or testimony of someone in the past. And because it comes from outside of you, there is still an element of doubt. And this element of doubt isn't bad, but it keeps you from reaching higher levels because what you think about is what expands. And if you're thinking doubt, then doubt is what expands. William Blake said, if the sun and moon should ever doubt, they would immediately go out. So how do we get past what we believe in or what has been handed to us and still honor it and be grateful for all of the teachers and all of the people who have come before us? So what we have to learn to do is let go of that tribal consciousness and shift to what I call a knowing. Now, there's a big difference between what you believe and what you know. Everything that you know is something that you have made conscious contact with. Conscious contact. So there's nobody out there watching, there's nobody in this world who knows how to swim, who learned it. By somebody else telling them that you can swim, or by watching Mark Spitz go through the water, or by, uh, observing other people doing it. You may remove some of the doubt, but you will never know how to swim until you get in the water and blub around a few times and then do it. And then you'll have a knowing, and that knowing is something that you'll never lose. Just like riding a bicycle or dancing the Macarena. Or making a, uh, a lemon meringue pie or anything that you know how to do, it's because you've made conscious contact. And I'd like to suggest that there's a big difference between knowing about a divine presence, knowing about a sacred awareness, knowing about God, and knowing God. There's a big difference, just like there's a big difference between knowing about the possibility of being able to heal myself of something that is bothering me, perhaps a disease process. I perhaps may believe that it's possible because I've read other people and I've heard others say it, and I've read the testimony and I've listened to the tapes and I've gone to the seminars. But until you have made conscious contact with it, you'll never know it. And I'd like to suggest there are, there's a wonderful poem. I'd like to share this poem with you. It's, uh, written by a wonderful woman. Her name is Valerie Cox, and she lives up in Seattle, and she's written quite a bit of poetry. This particular poem really speaks to me to the difference between what you know and what you believe in. Immerse yourself in this, in these words. A woman was waiting at an airport one night with several long hours before her flight. She hunted for a book in the airport shop, bought a bag of cookies, and found a place to drop. She was engrossed in her book, but happened to see that the man beside her, as bold as could be, grabbed a cookie or two from the bag between, which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene. She munched cookies and watched the clock as this gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock. She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by, thinking, if I wasn't so nice, I'd blacken his eye. With each cookie she took, he took one too, and when only one was left, she wondered what he'd do. With a smile on his face and a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half. He offered her half as he ate the other. She snatched it from him and thought, oh brother, this guy has some nerve and he's also rude. Why, he didn't even show any gratitude. She had never known when she had been so galled and sighed with relief when her flight was called. She gathered her belongings and headed to the gate, refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate. She boarded the plane and sank in her seat, then sought her book, which was almost complete. As she reached in her baggage, she gasped with surprise. There was her bag of cookies in front of her eyes. I love that. I love that. If mine are here, she moaned with despair, then the others were his and he tried to share. Too late to apologize, she realized with grief that she was the rude one, the ingrate. The thief, the cookie thief. And all of us in some ways are cookie thieves. I have 8 beautiful children. Our youngest little girl's 8 years old. One of the things that you do when you become enlightened and become a guru like me, that'll be the day, is when we place something that is important to know where it is, we practice mindfulness.
Mm-hmm.
So that we never misplace anything. So obviously, having reached this exalted level of awareness in my home with my 8 children, I never misplace anything. So I place my keys right here in a certain spot, but my little girl has this wonderful habit of taking my keys and hiding them on Daddy in the morning so that she can watch me flip out. As I look for the keys and I'll say, Sage, how many times has Daddy told you don't hide my keys in the morning? Daddy, you told me not to do it. I don't hide your keys anymore.
Come on.
Where'd you put my keys? The last time they were in your dollhouse. Where did you put 'em?
Daddy, you told me not to do it.
And then of course, my 12-year-old daughter Serena loves to just assume this stance. She's watching me raise my voice. She'll say, I wonder what all those people would think of Mr. Positive if they could see him right now. Get lots of reminders. So I give up. I say, look, when I come back out here, I want those keys here. And I go back and I get my clothes on and I reach in my back pocket and there are my keys right where I had left them the night before in my pocket. And there's a fine line, I think, between being a guru and being a jerk.
All right.
And I probably crossed that line more times than I should be admitting here on television. But this idea of being a cookie thief and creating a knowing, a knowing is something I did a benefit, uh, along with my wife a couple of, uh, years ago with a man, uh, on Maui, uh, whose name is Michael Knopf, who had been, uh, injured, uh, in a, uh, in an accident. He's a, uh, quadriplegic or paraplegic. And at that meeting, when it was over, there was a, a man who lived on another one of the islands who was known as a kahuna, a healer, an ancient healer from Polynesia. And he was introduced to me and he said, that was a nice talk and so on. And I said, um, how do you get to be a kahuna? You know, do, do you take Kahuna 101? I mean, uh, what courses do you take? How, what, how does this work out? And he said, no. He said, the kahunas are raised to have no doubt, to have no doubt, to have a knowing. And he said, when a, when a knowing confronts a belief in a disease process, the knowing will always triumph. And that knowing is something in which you say you are healed and healing takes place. One of the great stories of knowing is again with our little girl Sage, who, uh, we were, Uh, spending the summer, uh, in, in our summer home. And we went to visit, uh, this, uh, dermatologist. And Sage has had this thing called flat warts for the last, uh, well, since she was 2 and a half years old. From 2 and a half until 7, which is over 4 years, she had these flat warts. And not only did she have them around her face, around her, uh, mouth and around her nose, but they were getting worse. They were moving up and they were getting up around her eyes and And we noticed that, that they were getting progressively worse, even though all of the places that we had taken her had said they will go away, she'll outgrow them. But it didn't seem to be that way. And they always said it would be a few months. Well, years had gone by and she still hadn't. So we were over at my, my friend's, uh, this dermatologist on, uh, in Kihei. And he, um, he, I said, uh, Kenny, as long as we're here, would you mind taking a look at, uh, at Sage? And my wife was there and he took these big white light and he put it in her face and he said, uh, you've got flat warts. She hates that term. She never wanted to call them flat warts. She calls them her bumps. All right? She just called them her bumps. So, um, he said to her, but the good news is that when you get married, you won't have them. Well, she's 7 and a half going, oh, who is this dork you've got me talking to now? And then he said to her something. He said, you know, we can't burn them off and there's no medicine that we can give them. But he did say something to the effect that the ability to rid yourself of these things is within yourself. And that if you can call upon that healing capacity in you and begin to talk to these bumps in a way in which you ask them to leave, that you have a much greater chance of getting rid of them faster than anything that I could give you. And we certainly can't burn them off because we might scar your pretty face. And that's basically the message that he gave us. I'm paraphrasing it. So we went back that night to where we were staying, and there was a whole bunch of kids there, as there always are when, uh, when we're staying, and all of their friends were there. And we walked into the bedroom and it was late at night. And over in the corner in a, uh, on her air mattress was Sage. And she had the blankets pulled up over her head and she had a flashlight. Underneath the blankets. And I went over and I lifted up the blanket. I said, honey, is, is everything all right? She said, shh, I'm talking to my bumps. And I left the room and I came into my wife. We're in the other bedroom. I said, honey, you're not gonna believe this, but Sage is in there talking to her bumps.
Isn't that great?
Yeah. The next night we did the same thing. That was the second night. The third night, the same thing. Now that was Thursday. On Friday, This happened on Monday. On Friday, as God is my witness, on television, every single one of those bumps was gone and has never reappeared since.
A knowing.
You see, there is a stream of healing that is something that we can plug into. It's very much like electricity. People say, well, in ancient Greece there was no electricity. There was electricity. We just didn't plug into it. That's all. And there's a stream of healing. And when we go into that stream of healing with a knowing, we go to a higher level within ourselves and we don't allow any doubt in. Basically, in every single one of us, every human being out there, there are 2 of us. There's 2 people. The first person in each, uh, person is called the ego, or I call it the ego. E-G-O. Earth guide only. All right. This is the part of us that says, who I am is separate from you, separate from God, separate from my environment, and therefore I'm in competition with, and my value is based upon how much I get, how much my stuff is worth, how much better looking I might be, or how much, uh, attractive I might be. How much more money I might have, the value of my possessions, and so on. What is mine? So it's not mystical awareness, which says I am connected. It is that individual lower level of awareness, which says my ego, this is mine. Also, in each and every one of us, there's another person, and this other person is called what I call the sacred self.
Or the higher self.
And this sacred or higher self really doesn't care how much you get. It doesn't care who you're better than. It doesn't care how much stuff you have. It's not interested in any of that. The problem is that we very seldom listen to it. We pay very little attention to it. This higher or sacred part of us wants only one thing. It wants us to be at peace.
At peace.
Whatever choice you make in every interaction you have, make the choice to be at peace, your sacred or higher self says. Whereas your ego says, oh no, no, no, no, it's much more important to be right. And so we find people in relationships struggling, struggling a lot. And one of the things that they struggle about is who's right and who's wrong. Most of the fights that you have in your relationships really basically, when you, it's oftentimes you forget the details. But it's basically about who's right and who's wrong. So that if you want to have your higher or your sacred part of you ruling in your life, I suggest this to you. Practice being kind rather than right when you have the choice. And you have the choice in your relationships with your spouse and your ex-spouse, with your parents, with your grandparents, with your in-laws. With strangers on the freeway, with flight attendants, with waiters, with whomever you interact. If you can just subdue this ego part of you which says it's important for me to be right, which will introduce you to stress and anxiety and fear and so much of the stuff that I talked about earlier, and instead say, how can I suspend this part of me and allow the Allow the part of me that wants to be at peace, that wants to be happy, that wants to be fulfilled. And if I said to you, I'm gonna give you a magic wand, and with this magic wand, I am going to allow you to just wave it and get anything that you want, whatever you want. You can have this, you can have this car, you can have this, these, uh, nice clothes over here. You can have this home, whatever it is. Or I said to you, in lieu of that, I'm gonna give you another wand and you can wave this. And for every moment for the rest of your life, You'll be at peace. Whatever comes along, you'll be able to choose peace. And basically, we know that we're only here for a very short time, and being able to choose peace, which is what the sacred part of you begs you, the higher self. Once you get that, you begin to shift away and you stop telling yourself that the people who are close to me in relationship with me are the people who don't belong there. I remember my wife and I, we often talk about this and we, we, we've been together a long time. We've had many children together and we have a very wonderful, loving relationship. Thank you. But we'd often, and one time I said to her, or she said to me, you know, we love each other, but this doesn't sound like love.
It does.
Sometimes the way we talk to each other doesn't sound like love.
Let's practice.
Let's practice with each other being kind rather than being right. And it was transformative that, that when we had that walk, that, and doing that with your children and doing that with a waiter. I mean, a waiter who comes to you and is like, you know, hassled and frazzled and has been busy and all of that. And your ego says, wait a minute, I'm here and I'm important and I have a right to be served and I have a right to be served now. That's the ego part of you. If this, if you can suspend that and say, you know, You are a lucky man tonight. You got somebody who's dealing from his sacred self, and I understand. And you take your time and you come to me and you bring it at your convenience whenever you can. I'm willing to, I'm willing to suspend my, and you know what? You'll get served so fast and with such gratitude just for being kind. If you practice it, every single one of us are in relationship. Whether it's with our husbands and wives, with our ex-husbands and wives, with our children, our grandchildren, whether it's with people we drive along the freeway next to, whether it's with waiters and waitresses or baggage handlers or flight attendants or, uh, people that we are in line to get into the movie.
We're all in relationships and we interact with each other all the time.
And probably the best lesson that I've ever learned in my life about how to be in a relationship in a way which is powerful and happy and fulfilling is to remember this sentence: when you have a choice, and you always do, to be right or to be kind, start picking kind. The ego part of us wants to be right. How dare you not serve me as fast as I think I deserve to be served? How dare you say something to me? And immediately we want to make that other person wrong and make ourselves right. But there's a part of each one of us that wants to be happy, wants to be at peace. And that part of us says, it doesn't matter whether you're right. It doesn't matter about your ego. All you want is to be at peace.
So pick kind. This kind of an attitude, if we had more of this, not only in our own personal lives would we improve virtually every relationship we have with all of the people closest to us and all of the strangers we interact But on our planet as well, we would begin to understand the wisdom that on a round planet, there's no choosing upsides, that we're all one. We're all breathing the same air. We're all drinking the same water.
We're all being warmed by the same sun. And as they say, as the Native Americans used to say, no tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves. It applies to everything. In your relationships, and it applies as a people as well. I've often said that in any relationship in which 2 people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary.
All right?
So it isn't about getting somebody who's just like you. In fact, your soulmate is the person that you have a lot of difficulty with. Your soulmate's the person you can't get rid of. They just keep showing up. You, you, you say this, they say that, and there they are. They're back again and they never go away. They keep showing up in your life. And everybody has these people. These are our greatest teachers because anybody in your life who can push a button and send you into a frenzy is the person who's your greatest teacher. You know why? Because they teach you that you haven't mastered yourself at this moment. You don't know how to choose peace. In A Course in Miracles, there's a wonderful line that says, I can choose peace rather than this, whatever it is. I can choose peace. My soulmate, my wife is one of my soulmates. I mean, she knows how to push those buttons. She's really good at it. And she's one of my greatest teachers. I remember saying to her one time, honey, do you love me for who I am or for what I've been able to do? for you?
I just wanna—
She said that you call yourself a spiritual person. I can't believe you would even ask a question like that. She said, I don't love you for what you can buy for me or what success that you've had or where you are on any bestseller list. I love you for who you are and I will always love you. I said, well, I was just asking. I said, what if I was just Joe Sixpack, you know, and I was just bringing home, you know, a, a meager salary and so on? She said, I will always love you for who who you are. She said, I would miss you, but I would always love you. She knows she's got that. Yeah. And all of us have soulmates. My daughter Serena, who's, uh, just turned 13, my teeny bopper, she came home from school one day. She said, there's a rumor in our school. She saw somebody had seen me on television, that you actually wrote a book about how to raise children. Tell me it isn't true. I said, honey, you can come and hear me speak. Would you like to come and hear me speak? I said, people actually pay to hear me speak. She said, why? I mean, she's, she's got that. All right. She's, she's, but her soulmate is her sister Summer, who is, is now almost 15. But when Serena was 12 and Summer was 14, my wife was away working on a book of hers, and I was taking care of everything at home while she was working on her book about a spiritual approach to childbirth and infancy care. And she's as qualified as anybody to write about that, I can tell you. And I was making breakfast. I was making waffles for them in the morning at the toaster. And, uh, She mixes all this stuff up. It's a lot easier to just put 'em in. And Summer and Serena were sitting at the back table in the kitchen, and I heard Summer say to Serena out of nowhere, about 6:30 in the morning, if you didn't have any feet, would you wear shoes? And I turned around, I said, where is this going? And Serena went, that's ridiculous. What do you mean if I didn't have any Feet, would I wear shoes? She said, of course not. And Summer said to her, then why are you wearing that bra? Everybody's got a soulmate. Stormed outta the room and it was all— but it isn't the people who agree with us. It isn't the people who tell us the right thing. It isn't the people who always, uh, find us, you know, just perfectly smelling good and so on. There is an element of understanding that everybody who shows up in our life has something to teach us. Many people have said to me that they have observed in my writing and in my teaching over the years that I have, um, changed. I've evolved, if you will, that when I first wrote Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings and books like, like this, that I was really talking about something much different than I'm talking about today, which is spirituality, higher awareness, higher consciousness. And it's true because one of the great teachers again in my life was Carl Jung. And in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, he said that there are archetypes, there are stages that we go through when we reach adulthood. He said those stages work like this. He said it starts out with the athlete when you reach adulthood. And he called it the athlete, not as a putdown of athletes, but as the time in our adult life when our primary emphasis is on our body, what it can do, how strong it is, how How fast it can run, how much it can lift, how beautiful it is, and so on. And we believe that we are a body, if you will, perhaps with a soul. He said the second stage is what he called the stage of the warrior. And this is the time in our adult life when we take ourselves out of our physical, uh, self, if you will, and we take this body out into the world and we do what warriors do, which we attempt to conquer, we attempt to defeat. We attempt to get as much as we can. It's the age of the ego. It's the time when we're saying, what are my quotas? What's in it for me? What can I get? And we go through that stage. And I believe that I was writing earlier in my life to teach people how to be better athletes and better warriors because that's where I was in my life in those days. And the shift has taken place for me as well. Jung said that the 3rd, uh, archetype is what he called the the, uh, archetype of the, uh, of the statesman or the stateswoman. And this is when we finally get to a place in our adult life when we stop saying, what's in it for me? How much can I get? How much can I accumulate? And we begin to ask the question, how may I serve? What are your quotas? And serving others becomes much more important than our own egos until ultimately we reach what he called the stage of the spirit. The archetype of the spirit. When we finally begin to recognize that, that this is not our home, what it means in the holy books when it says you are in this world, but you are not of this world. And these 4 stages represent also where we can look at our own self. How am I doing going through these? To what extent do I find myself consumed with my own quotas? What's in it for me? How much can I get? And ask ourselves that question as we begin to interact and deal with other people. Being able to manifest, being able to be attract into our lives what it is that we'd like to attract into our lives boils down to a formula that I'd like to share with you here this evening. And this formula is one that everyone that I know who is able to get things into their life practices This, I call it the 4 reallys.
All right?
So that what you really, really, really, really want, you will get. And these 4 reallys stand, each of them stands for something. And if you look at people who are good at, some people call them lucky, some people call them highly spiritual, whatever it might be, but they are good at getting what they want in in their lives.
And here are the 4 reallys.
The first one says, I wish. So what you really wish for, everything that you'd like to get into your life starts with a wish.
It's a thought.
I wish I could get that job. I wish I could get that promotion. I wish I could lose weight. I wish I could get rid of that addiction that I have. I wish I could, whatever.
It's a wish.
So what you have to start with a wish. The second really stands for what you desire, what you really wish and desire. And the difference between what you wish for and desire is in what I call asking. Ask and you shall receive. Ask and you shall receive. It's not empty words. Be willing to ask. When I get stuck sometimes writing and I'm just not quite sure where to go or whatever, I just leave the typewriter, I leave the yellow pad that I'm writing on. I walk over to the couch and I get into a meditation and I say, I would like some help in having this become clearer as to how to express it. And it's always there. Sometimes the phone will ring and my wife will call and she'll say, did you know that this was in the mail? And I'll say, read it to me and it'll be exactly what I needed. Sometimes it just comes in the mo— in the thing that I call an intuition or an insight, whatever it might be. The third really stands for what I intend. So now you shift away from what I wish for and ask for, and you frame it in such a way that you intend to create it. I intend to create this, whatever it might be, whether it's a healing, whether it's a, uh, losing of weight, whether it's getting rid of an an addiction, whether it's creating prosperity, I intend to create it. And if you notice, people who are good at manifesting, they don't mince those kinds of words. I will do it. And someone will say, well, what if it doesn't work out? You say, well, then I'll just learn whatever I have to learn from it not working out, but I intend to create this in my life. There's an intention, and the intention is so powerful that you become independent of the good opinion of other people. You're not checking it out with the tribe. You're not checking it out with what everybody else out there said you should do or shouldn't do. You're saying to yourself, I intend to create it. And I often tell people, don't tell anybody else about what you wanna manifest. Don't make it a big statement. Instead, keep it to yourself. And they say, why do you wanna say that? I say, because the minute that you do, you invoke ego. And in quantum physics, there's a simple line that says particles themselves are not responsible for their own creation. Another way of saying that is the way St. Paul said it. That which is seen, he said, hath not come from that which doth appear. That is the source of everything over here. It's not over here. It's in this invisibleness. And once you invoke ego, you have to defend it. You have to explain it. You have to get the tribe involved in it. And before long, you've lost the capacity to manifest. It's a spiritual Journey. Inspiration in spirit. When you're inspired in spirit. The 4th really stands for passion.
Passion.
That is, I am absolutely passionate about it and I intend to create it with that love. One of the great books that one of my teachers sent to me from ancient India, written like 3,000 years ago, has a line in it that says, to attempt to manifest what you want without passion is like dressing up a corpse. So you take this corpse and you put a tuxedo on it and you dress it all up and you put all the makeup on it and you take it out into the world and you say, now see what you can get for me. But it basically, it's dead inside. And if it's dead inside, that is, if it lacks passion, if you lack passion, You're not gonna be able to attract it into your life. So what you wish for, ask for, intend to create, and have passion about, you'll get, you'll get it. That's the good news. The bad news is that what you really, really, really, really don't want, you will also get. And this is one of the most difficult things for people to understand. And when you're dealing with the tribe and you're dealing with what is and what, uh, what everybody else tells you is impossible, and somebody might be watching this and say, well, that's just a lot of nonsense. I mean, you can't just put your attention on something, think about it, and have it come true. It involves a whole lot of other stuff like that. You see, here's how it works. You cannot attract thin from I hate being fat. Because if what you think about is what expands, and what you're thinking about is hating being fat, then hating being fat is what you will continue to manifest. You act upon what you think about. You cannot attract prosperity from an inner consciousness that says, I hate being poor. I despise being poor. Because if you despise being poor, if you're angry about being poor, Then being angry about being poor or despising it is what you will continue to act upon, and you'll be able to say, see? Now that's— it gets worse. You cannot manifest what you want if your attention is on what is. If your attention is on what is and the circumstances of your life, that's where your thoughts are. Then you will continue to create what is into your life. You've gotta figure out a way to get your mental images, your energy, your attention, your higher awareness off of what is and onto what you want. And every time your thoughts are on what is, you shift it to what do I want? And it's even worse than that. You cannot manifest what you want if your attention is on what always has been. This is the way things are. You'll hear people say it to you all the time. These are the circumstances of life. Don't you understand? This is reality.
Wake up.
These are the way things have always been. There's always been poor people. You're one of them. That's just the way it is. And you watch that person and being poor continues to manifest into their life.
That's right.
If you keep your attention on what always has been, then what always has been is what you'll continue to manifest. As you think, so shall you be. These aren't empty words, folks. This is reality. And the worst and ugliest of all is this: you cannot manifest what you want into your life, no matter what it is, if your attention is on what they want for you or what they expect for you. Or what they tell you are your limitations or what you can do. Because if your thoughts are on what they want, you cannot put your attention on what you want. What they want will continue to manifest. And you might be in a tribe that always turns left, and all you wanna do is make a right turn.
Yeah.
And you go to all the tribal elders and you say, look, I just wanna make one right turn. And they say, wait a minute, in our tribe we only turn left. We've always turned left. That's the way this tribe has always been. And so they will have an emergency meeting and they will convene all of the elders to get you to come to your senses. Jackson Browne has, well, I think one of the great poets on our, on our planet, great singer. He has a song called For a Dancer. In there, there are words to this effect. He says, just do the steps that you've been shown. By everyone you've ever known until the dance becomes your very own, which is what most of us are doing. We're doing the steps that we've been shown by everyone we've ever known, and the dance has become our very own. And later on in the song, he says something to the effect of, into a dancer you have grown from the seeds 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. And then the kicker, it always gets to me when I listen to this song. He said, because in the end, there is one dance you'll do alone. And it's like letting go of this tendency to be a dancer, to be doing the steps that we've been shown by everyone we've ever known. And then it becomes our own, and then we pass it on and we pass it on. To break that chain, we have to shift our attention off of what we don't want and onto what we do want. And this goes for everything. I was at a, uh, doing a book tour up in Chicago. I get off the airplane and a woman picks me up and she's got a doozy of a cold, like, you know, Snoopy's, as my kids call it, coming out of her nose onto her dress. I mean, it was different. And I was in a, in this little With her for 2 days. And she, so I said to her something to the effect, I can't remember what it was. I, I, I know she didn't like it, but I said something to the effect of, oh, it's been 20 years since I've had a cold like that. And she said, oh, that's just what I needed to hear. It's people like you who go around telling us normal mortal human beings that when we have a cold, we should be feeling guilty. Guilty. She said, I don't appreciate that at all. She said, colds are just things that happen to us. I said, well, I understand that. I said, but I just don't think like you. She said, well, what do you think? I said, well, tell me what you think. You're the one with the cold. She said, well, I think colds are viruses and that they're in the air and they're gonna land on us every once in a while. And when they do, we shouldn't be feeling guilty about it and feeling bad about it. And people, you like you writing books about it to make us feel worse. I said, look, we're on the same page here. I said, I believe just like you. I think that colds are in the air and that they're viruses and that they land on us. She said, well, how come you don't get a cold then? I said, because when they land on me, I talk to them. She said, you talk to viruses? I said, of course. She said, well, what do you say? Well, I say to it, look, you've landed on the wrong immune system. I'm not gonna talk about you to anyone. I'm not gonna complain about you. I'm not gonna give you any attention. And you have no room to flourish on this immune system. You're just not gonna do your work here. But there's a lady in Chicago who's waiting for you. Now you laugh and you think that that's silly, but I'm telling you that when you keep your attention on what you don't want, what you don't want is what will keep manifesting into your life. Addictions have been described as never getting enough of what you don't want or what you despise. So we keep our attention on what we don't want, and what we don't want is what we keep seeking after, and then we despise it. When we put our attention on what we do want, when we shift to a place called unconditional love and begin to view it as something that I don't have to be dependent dependent upon, you can shift right out of it. The currency for attracting what we want into our lives is our thoughts. As you think, so shall you be. Begin to place them on what it is that you want, and you'll start seeing it shift over and over again. And people who are terrific at getting what they want, you start getting inside of their head and say, what do you think like? What it, how are you organized in here? And you know what they always say? I never ever allow my thoughts on anything that I don't want. And no matter who out there is saying, yes, but you can't do this. Uh, yes, but you can't do that. I never allow that kind of energy. I don't, I shift away from that energy instantly. That's what separates great masters from ordinary human awareness. I have been talking During this program about a consciousness, an awareness, a level of functioning or living or thinking, which involves something that I call spirituality. It doesn't, it doesn't, it isn't restricted in any religious way. It is a divine intelligence, an organizing intelligence that is everywhere at once. Some people call it God. Some people call it soul. Some call it spirit. Back in the times of slavery, there was a young man. His name was John Newton. He was 23 years old, and he had what is called a— in Japanese it's called, excuse my Japanese, but it's called satori. I love to say that. Satori, S-A-T-O-R-I, and it means instant awakening. The idea that you can create something in your life now. In Zen, they have a proverb that says, when the student is ready, the teachers will appear. So it's just being ready. And so you don't have to go through this long involved process to get to enlightenment where you get it 5 minutes before you die. Instead, you can have it when you are ready. The Native Americans, they have a word called natahi in the Aleut Indians, natahi, and it means great seeing. Like, I don't see, I don't see, I don't see, and boom, there it is. I see. And it's like, it's like in a dream when you just have this awakening, this light goes off and you just know. It's intuition, if you will. Intuition has been described as, you know, if prayer is you talking to God, then intuition is God talking to you. It's like hearing that voice and you know it. And John Newton, this 23-year-old sea captain, had a, a, a ship full of, uh, human cargo that he was bringing from the west coast of Africa to the New World as slaves. And he had this satori, this awakening. And in this moment of awakening, he realized that what he was doing was horrible and defenseless. In terms of his own inner sense of morality. And he wrote down on the envelope the words to a song called— he called it Grace. I once was lost and now I'm found. And it was grace that taught my heart to feel. It was grace that brought me home. He shifted away from his material world and his, his being a warrior to being a spiritual being in an instant, which is available to every single one of us. There have been things that, uh, have been showing up in my life and principles for me to write about and, um, things for me to tell you and share with you that have, um, um, that have really surprised me. And I've always lived by the principle of Tilopa, the 10th century Sufi master who said, have a mind that is open to everything and attached nowhere, attached to nothing. And my wife and I always had this, um, attitude in, in bringing up our children that, um, keep an open mind and anything that, um, you immediately reject, get your ego out of that and just open yourself to the words of Jesus in the New Testament when he said, with God, all things are possible. And I always ask my audience, uh, what does that leave out? What does all things are possible leave out? And obviously the answer is nothing. In the book that I wrote, um, for the film The Shift, it was also called The Shift. Um, it has 4 chapters, From Ambition to Meaning, moving our lives away from our egos and into a place of, of meaning. What Serena was up here speaking about, it, it's a sense of feeling that you're making a difference in the world. And towards the end of that book, I quoted from, uh, A man named Joel Goldsmith who wrote The Infinite Way and Parentheses in Eternity. And we actually had friends on Maui, a friend on Maui named Alexandra who was in her 90s and in her late 80s. She would go out kayaking every day. And she actually dated Joel Goldsmith back in the 1950s when he lived on Hawaii. He's been a very much of a hero to me. And then from his book, Parentheses in Eternity, which is what your life is, a parenthesis in eternity. He said these words. He said, then there are those who reach a stage in which they realize the futility of this constant striving and struggling for the things that perish, things which after they are obtained prove to be shadows. It is at this stage that some persons turn from this seeking for things in the outer realm to a seeking for them from God. And that has been probably the major shift in my life, taking the focus in my life off of, um, the things, the accomplishments, the acquisitions, reputation, ownership, which we begin to identify ourselves as. And to begin to recognize that, uh, Pierre Teilhard, the great French priest who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his outrageous ideas in 1918, um, he said, you're not here as a human being. Having a spiritual experience, that it's the other way around. And you've all heard it, that we are all infinite spiritual beings having a temporary human experience and beginning to live our life from this spiritual place. It's place of spirit where we recognize and identify ourselves not on the basis of what the ego says, which is on the basis of what we have and what we accomplish, what we own, and what others think of us, not based on our belief in our separation from each other. And most egregiously, not based upon our belief in our separation from God. A shift, if you will, to an awareness of, uh, of our own divinity. And from that place, what is possible for all of us. So I'm going to recite a poem here from a, um, a great poet. His name was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He, um, he wrote a poem called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and he also wrote one that wasn't that well known. I put it in a book of mine years ago, called Real Magic. I started it with this, and I'd like you to, as I give these words, I, I'd, I'd like you to think about what the poet is asking and whether or not you believe in your heart or know in your heart that what I'm, what the poet is saying is possible for you, or whether you think it's just the fancy kind of, uh, fanciful meanderings and dreamings of a, uh, of an idealist. Ask yourself, is this possible? He said, what if you slept? And what if in your sleep you dreamed? And what if in your dream You went to heaven and there picked a strange and wonderful flower. And what if when you awoke, you held that flower in your hand? Ah, what then? He concludes his poem. Ah, what then? And I wonder if you think such a thing is, um, is really a possibility that you can go into a state in which there is no form, no beginnings, no ends, no boundaries, no limits, and bring from that invisible place something that has substance that has boundaries, that has form, that you can hold, that you can smell. And then ask yourself if that's a possibility. I wonder how many of you think yes and how many of you think no. I, I'm not gonna ask, but, um, the fact is that, um, this room has, it looks like 2,500 or so people in the room tonight. Um, every single one of you are an example of what that poet just described. Every single one of you came from a formless place and are now form. All of you. Every flower that you look at began in a seed, and the seed began in something that is invisible. There's a little girl here tonight, Camille.
Where's Camille?
6 years old or so, 7 years old. I was, I was swimming with her a little while ago and she showed me her teeth. And she said, uh, I lost 2 of my teeth and look, there's 2, 2 teeth coming underneath it. And she was all excited about that. And, um, I said to her mom and my daughter Summer, who was here, um, just imagine that in that tiny little infinite, infinitesimally small, Little speck that built into that was what she's going through right now.
What is there to do?
There's nothing for us to, we can, we can't make a change in that tiny little invisible speck. Everything that you needed for this physical journey was handed for you, and you don't believe in miracles. And the great Tao, many of you know, I lived, uh, the Tao for a year, the year I turned 65 and wrote a book on it, a book that I always tell people, carry it with you wherever you go. Some call it the wisest book ever written. And, um, I lived the principles of that little book and I encourage people to, uh, So just stick it in your new purse, the ones that are made out of plastic recycled water bottles. Is that all right? And, um, but just carry it with you because you don't even really need to, uh, open it cuz the energy from what's in here will come to you. I had a great teacher in India who used to say, he wrote a, uh, uh, a, a collection of his writings was called I Am That by, uh, Nisargadatta Maharaj. And he used to say to his devotees, you don't have to read it, just carry it with you. And I heard that, I was in my early 40s when I heard that, and I just thought, this is just another one of those crazy guys over there in India giving us advice. And, uh, I just didn't think that it would be possible to get. But now I've really come to an awareness that, uh, energy is in everything and that, um, just holding this book, literally, you could, you could muscle test this kinesiology and, um, put this thing next to your heart and you will be stronger with it than you were without it. Just try it. Just carry it with you. Let me see who would like a copy of this. Oh, that hand right there.
The first hand up. Yeah, you. Yep.
No, next to you.
Yeah. Stand up.
Would you like to carry this with you wherever you go? There you are. God bless you. The Tao Te Ching. It's only a few dollars. It's worth having. One of the great lines in the Tao is what I'm speaking about here at these opening lines is that, um, it says that none of you are doing anything. You're all just being done. And when you look at your physical body, there's a recognition that this is absolutely true. You know, I mean, what can you do to change it? You know, things are drooping, folks. You can fix 'em up if you want to, but, uh, the inevitable is there. And the hair, well, for some of you it turns gray, and for some of you it just Turns. It just goes somewhere else. And, um, you begin to see there's also a great line in the book because my son who's sitting in the front row, uh, Sands, who graduates, uh, in a couple of weeks and is gonna start supporting me. I'm so happy about that. Um, 'cause I often have quoted Lao Tzu and he has often said, The Tao, God, divine mind. The Tao does nothing and it leaves nothing undone.
It's all perfect.
So I say to him, when over the summer over in Maui, I said, Sans, come on, do something. You gotta do it.
Let's go. We gotta do something.
He looked up and he said, I do nothing. And I leave nothing undone. So this stuff can come back at you. It's his favorite line now. He's a Taoist philosopher. So the great saint, uh, Swami Muktananda, um, was asked the question, what is real? And his response is really worth you hearing.
What is real?
And something for you to really think about because the, the strange place that I think it's weird. It's just, um, it's just so magical, but it's still, it's just, it's hard for us to wrap our arms around this idea that all things are possible. Uh, this, this, this awareness that, um, that about what is real. And Muktananda said, that is real, which never changes. So what part of your physical life meets that definition? We are all in these, uh, bodies, that are changing every second. Therefore, by that definition, they're not real. So you go back and, um, look at how many bodies you've been in since you showed up here. You were in a body about this big that weighed somewhere between 5 and 10 pounds, and that was you. And you were in a little toddler body about this tall. And she certainly, if someone said, is that you? You would've said, yeah, that's me. And then you were in a 13-year, 12-year-old body, which is, um, one of these. I have 6 daughters and they have a stance, you know, when they're about 13 and they go like this and their leg goes up and down and they roll their eyes and look at you like you ought to try to get a life someplace. You were in one of those bodies, teenage body, and you thought that was real. That's when you get the great learnings. One of my daughters, Serena, said to me one time when I raised my voice and asked her to hurry up and get moving, come on. She looked at me. I wonder what all those people would think of Mr. Positive if they could see him here this morning. She turned to her sister and said, uh, would you buy a book from someone who yells at his 11-year-old daughter? I, I sneak outta the room and try to— best line I ever heard from any of my children ever. And I followed them around with a pad of paper to give me material was from my daughter Summer. When she was 13 and her sister was 11, sitting at the breakfast table, and all of a sudden about 6:30 in the morning, and Summer looked at Serena and said, well, if you didn't have any feet, would you wear shoes? Serena at that time, and it hasn't gone away, um, could hardly stand anybody talking to her at 6 o'clock in the morning. And said, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard you say.
Don't even talk to me. Why are you— why are you—
just don't even talk to me. Close your mouth. Why are you talking to me? That's so stupid. Only if I didn't have any feet would I wear shoes.
Of course not.
And Summer looked at him and said, don't get mad at me. I just wonder why you're wearing that bra.
That's, uh—
So, You were in one of those bodies. I was in a 20-year-old body. And, um, I saw a picture of it on the PBS show and I was doing a little bit of this. And the pictures of me at various stages of my life were going by and the film was, uh, uh, the camera was looking at this picture and it stopped on a picture of me when I was about 20 years old and I'm 71. That was 51 years ago. And, um, there's not one cell of that body left on this planet. I really thought it was real. And when you were in your 20-year-old body, you thought it was real, didn't you? I mean, it's just like you'd look at it and you'd say, of course it's real. And now you look back at it and to say, if it was real, where is it?
And where did it go?
Emily Dickinson, another great poet, one of my very favorite poets from Massachusetts, would, um, would give talks back in the 19th century, and she would pick up a handful of, of dirt and she would say, just let this in. This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies and lads and girls, was laughter and ability and sighing and frocks and curls. This passive place, A summer's nimble mansion where bloom and bees fulfilled their oriental circuit, then ceased like these. That's who you are. If you believe that you're your body, just quiet dust that's going to fulfill its circuit and cease. And we all know that we're something much more than that, but we haven't been raised to believe that. So my talk tonight is really about understanding there is a component of us that is beyond the physical meta. Beyond the physical, metaphysical, um, beyond form, trans— Over, past, higher than form, transformed. And this, um, this part of who we are has infinite possibilities and can do anything, can heal anything, can manifest anything, can attract into our lives the right people. And you get a sense after a while that, um, that this invisibleness that is who we are is as, as you begin to elevate your awareness and move to a higher level and And this is basically the essence of it. It's that we were all conceived and born into a world and a culture in which we were raised to be ordinary. And ordinary isn't so bad. I'm not here to put down ordinary and average and fitting in. and all the things that ordinary, uh, comprises. It's just not what I want for me. And I got the mic tonight. So, and ordinary really means, um, it means fitting in. It means getting along. It means becoming a good citizen. It means, um, filling out the forms. It means paying your taxes. It means having your children and providing for them and taking care of them and, uh, going to work, going to school and getting good grades and graduating and your family and doing all of this. All of this, these ordinary things. And then getting to the, uh, later stages in your life where you become a grandparent and then you live your life through your grandchildren and then you die. And, and this isn't an, an indictment of that. It's, um, it's for me an awareness that if I put my hands here about at my waist, I am speaking about ordinary consciousness. And where I would like to take you tonight, where, where I have been taken in my life, particularly in the last year or so, and particularly in the last decade or so, um, Is to a place that I call extraordinary awareness. And extraordinary awareness is, um, it encompasses all of ordinary so that you're listening to an ordinary man. I fill out the forms or I get somebody to do it for me. More like it. Um, and I pay my taxes and, um, I've provided for all of my children. And, um, and I went to school and saw that they went to school and was there for them as much as I could be. And, um, did all of the things that we would say constitute ordinary, but extraordinary doesn't, doesn't stop here. See, this is where it stops for so many people. And they go through their life with this, um, remember the Barbra Streisand song, Is That All There Is? There's this, the sense that, uh, that there's more. There's a calling. There's something in me that transcends the physical. that transcends ordinary. And this something that, um, wants to move us to this extraordinary level out here is, um, is beyond the ego. Everything I've spoken about here is, is the ego. It's the striving for, it's, um, it's, it's an identification. Identification and a belief in my identity as a physical being and believing in what my physical self tells me is my reality and evaluating it on the basis of what I can see and touch and feel and smell and hear so that it's my senses, my, my sensory self is here. But this up here, Between ordinary and extraordinary, where I believe anyone can go at any time. Here we are with E.E. Cummings, another favorite poet. He said, to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you just like everybody else. Means to fight the greatest battle there is to fight and never stop fighting. This is how the poets think. It's about going beyond average. It's about going beyond ordinary. It's about recognizing your own divinity. It's about understanding that there's something inside of you that is calling you. It's your spirit. It's your soul. And your soul, your spirit is here in the distance between here and here. And your soul wants something very, very different than your physical body ego apparatus wants. It, it's really, it's not interested in fitting in. It doesn't care whether you're right. It doesn't care whether people like you.
It doesn't care.
about whether you're a good citizen or not. I wrote these words out the other night. Let me share them with you. It says, I said, the ideal, 'cause I'm gonna write about this, the ideal of the soul, the thing that it asks for, Is neither knowledge nor light nor happiness. The ideal of the soul is space. The ideal of the soul is immensity. The one thing it needs is to be free to expand, to reach out, to embrace the infinite. Yeah. The ideal of the soul is infinity. It is, it is miserable when it is circumscribed and restricted. The soul is not finite. What is finite? Finite means it has a beginning and it has an end. Doesn't it?
So it's, that's it.
It stops here and it's finite. It, the opposite of finite is infinite. Infinite. And what is infinite? What does it mean when something is infinite? It means that it is always expanding, right? It doesn't stop anyplace. It is always growing.
It's like the universe.
It's just infinite. What do you think's at the end of the universe? Just try to imagine a finite universe and we come up with, well, what would be at the end of it? And what we think is at the end of it is what? What is there, a wall? If there's a wall at the end of the universe, the poet would ask, what's on the other side? And where does that end? So this getting in touch with this infinite part of ourselves is really the part of us that says— there was a song that was popular when my mother was a young woman. It was called Don't Fence Me In. Oh, give me land, lots of land, and the starry skies above. Don't fence me in.
Remember that song?
All the old folks singing. My daughter's looking at me, what is he gonna do now? He's gonna embarrass me. We don't want to be fenced in. Now, before I had any children, I had 8 theories about how to raise children. I even wrote about them. Now we have 8 children. I have no theories. But the one thing I know about raising children is this, that nobody likes being told what to do, right, Sage? I was telling the story of, uh, you, honey, um, on Mother's Day one year at a restaurant where We were all there. My mother, Marcy's mom and dad, and we were all there. And, and, um, Sage is, um, in a lot of ways like me, the, the, what I call the, I tell this story at every talk, so I might as well. Here's the scurvy elephant.
Yeah.
When I was in a foster home back in Mount Clemens, when I was about 6 or 7 years old, I came home from school and Mrs. Scarf, who ran this home, had this home that a bunch of us lived. And I came home and I asked her, what's a scurvy elephant? And she said, a what? And she said, a scurvy elephant. I mean, I said, and she said, well, where did you hear that?
I said, well, I heard Mrs.
Poole, who was my 3rd grade teacher, talking to the principal. And she said that, uh, Wayne Dyer was in her classroom and that he was a scurvy elephant. So she got on the phone. Called the principal and the principal said, oh no. And she said, that's Wayne. He gets everything mixed up. She didn't say that he was a scurvy elephant in her classroom. She said that he was a disturbing element in her classroom. And I always love to say that. So a scurvy elephant is, uh, and my teacher Abraham Maslow used to always say to us, um, You know, the, the number one marker of self-actualizing people is their, uh, their independence of the good opinion of other people. They're just not interested in being told what to do. I watched on the, um, on my iPad, which I just got. Um, and it, um, it had a, uh, A commencement address by, uh, Steve Jobs at Stanford University. It was a 15-minute, and I just sat there and before I meditated, I listened to what he had to say. This immensely scurvy elephant who really, I mean, just passed away a few weeks ago. And, um, you know, many of his biographers now saying that he's up there with, uh, Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin and, uh, Alexander Graham Bell, people like that. I mean, he really changed who we are as a people and how we communicate with each other. And his advice to the whole graduating class at Stanford was, don't live somebody else's dharma. Don't listen to that inner calling and whatever it calls you to do, listen to it and don't pay attention to anybody telling you, what's possible or what's not possible, or to just fight for it. Sage was at Mother's Day, and I don't even remember what it was that she wanted to wear or didn't wanna wear, but, um, it had something to do with dresses and skirts and slacks. And I remember that Mother's Day walking in the parking lot with Sage for 45 minutes or so, talking to her about Um, I know exactly how you feel and how you think. I said, but there's a lot of people who think that you should maybe wear something nice. It's Mother's Day and it's a restaurant. I said, but, uh, you don't have to go back in there. We'll go home and get something afterwards if you want. And, uh, she just gimme that, you know, I don't wanna do this and why should I be told what to wear? And I understood that. I understood it very strong. And she's still doing that. But it also serves people very, very well. This idea that, um, I'm gonna listen to that voice and we all have it. And when we have this voice and this voice has passion associated with it, that is when you feel a strong passion towards what it is that you want to become, what you want to create. the kind of person that you intend to, to be. When you have that within you, um, it doesn't make any difference whether anybody else understands it or gets along with it. You don't even try to talk to anybody else about it. You just listen to it and you become a disturbing element. You become a scurvy elephant in the world. And, and it's the only way you'll ever feel fulfilled. You won't get it by, by fitting in. So in order to, you have to listen to your soul, and your soul is that invisibleness, and your soul is not finite. Therefore, everything up to here is finite. Everything that I spoke about, filling out the forms, fitting in, being a good citizen, doing all the right things, all these things which I God, which are all fine, but they only take you, um, you end up living a half-lived life. Herman Melville. I spoke about him this morning when I spoke to the writer's group here. I mean, his writing was so profound and so beautiful, and he, uh, he had this one line from Moby Dick, which is really not the story about a man chasing a whale. It's a story of, um, a person who has an obsession, and that whale is a symbol of, uh, I must achieve it. I read a really great book this summer. Every one of my kids have read it, and it's called Unbroken by Laura Hill—
Miller Brand.
And, um, I recommend that you read it. And wherever this is going around the world, get a copy of it. It's the story of Louis Zamperini who, um, survived on a raft across the ocean and was taken to a Japanese prisoner of war camp and on and on and on and survived against all odds. And then at the end was able to go back and forgive. I mean, it's just a powerful beautiful spiritual experience. And, um, and Ahab was, uh, was pursuing his own, uh, inner voice that just couldn't be stilled. And this is how Melville spoke, cuz I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, Maui, where I invite you to come in January to listen to the whales. Go on a whale watch with me. And if you like what I'm speaking about here tonight, we do 3, 2 or 3 days on it in January. Here's Melville. He said, for as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man, Lies one insular Tahiti full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half-lived life. The half-lived life is the life that gets you to ordinary, to filling out the forms and then stopping. The self-actualized life starts at ordinary and listens to its soul, which you can't find, but you know is there. And there are some that doubt that it's there. I had a friend who's a neurosurgeon over on Maui, and he was saying, you know, you talk about this soul thing a lot. He said, I poked a around in a lot of human brains, and I've never seen a soul or anything resembling a soul. And I asked him, I said, Chuck, I said, um, while you're in there poking around, have you ever seen a thought? Well, no, of course not. I said, do you think there are thoughts? That such a thing as a thought exists? You can't see it. You can't touch it. You can't. The fact is that virtually everything that exists is metaphysical beyond the physical. It's very limited, our physical world, and it's not even real by Muktananda standards because it's always changing. The body that you came into this room with will be a different, you'll leave in a different body. There's something called you. that just keeps occupying more and more and more new bodies until ultimately it just sheds it altogether. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats said, um, an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat, upon a stick.
What an image.
Unless soul claps its hands and sings and louder sings for every tatter in its mortal dress.
We're just tattered coats on a stick unless we have a soul.
And when we have a soul, the soul says, Don't fence me in. The soul says, don't tell me what to be. Don't tell me what I can't do. Don't you dare impose upon me who you are and what you think I should be. That's your soul. And all of you have this cuz this body of yours is just an illusion. It's just a very temporary parentheses in eternity, isn't it? And you know that you're gonna leave it and all the evidence is there and you just keep looking at it. You try to pretend that it's not there. And so you color the gray, the color of the gray, and you lift 'em up and you shift it around and you put on a girdle and you do all of the, I don't know, you do all of this stuff to pretend that it's, and you're not doing a damn thing in this world. You're just being done. You're just being done. But what you're being done by is the higher self. So what I would like to offer you here is a, um, a program, if you will, a, it's sort of a preview. I've been, reading and studying and, um, lecturing all over the place for the last year or two. And for some reason, I've been given a, a, a big voice and a, uh, a big audience. For some reason, I'm, I'm allowed to, uh, go on public television and, and present in prime time, 3 and 4-hour specials. on the Tao Te Ching or on the power of intention or on changing your life, living from a spiritual place. And, um, it must be because I have had this, um, wonderful opportunity handed to me that, um, I've been getting exposed to more and more and more about, um, the miraculous power that comes to us when we start our life from ordinary and just leave that part of it to be taken care of and move into this extraordinary place, this place, um, that all the great writers speak about where we, where we transcend this ego, this ego of ours that's, um, believes that who we are is so important and believes that who we are is what we own, and who believes that what we are is in competition with others and has to defeat others and has to win and has to, has to be better than.
I love the poets. I feel very poetic tonight.
Uh, a great, um, Indian poet, Named Rabindranath Tagore, won the, uh, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 with a collection of poetry called Gitanjali. And in there he writes about this ego of ours. He says, um, I went out alone on my way to my tryst, but who is this me? In the dark. I step aside to avoid his presence, but I escape him not. He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger. He adds his loud voice to every word I utter. He is my own little self, my Lord. He knows no shame. But I, the invisible me, I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company. That's the ego, the part of us that makes the dust rise from the earth with our swagger, who's always adding his loud voice. But inside there's there's this being that says, um, who I am is so much more than that, so much more divine. And in order to get to the path of moving towards extraordinary, and the fact is that, um, even though many people will attend a talk like this and many people will buy the books and, uh, and study it and look at it, the percentage of people who are willing to leave ordinary behind is very, very small. Honestly, it's only a handful of people in this room, even though the intentions are good. The, um, the book that I'm reading now, I came across a quote. Um, I think I'm gonna read it if I have it here.
Ah, here it is.
It was by a, a French, um, Philosopher, mathematician. Some of you studied him when you took a philosophy class. His name was René Descartes. He's the one who said, I think, therefore I am. I don't like to question these guys. I used to teach them at the university, but I think he had it backwards. I really believe it should be, I am, therefore I think. Well, that's just my opinion. I'll talk about it later. And Descartes said, in order to reach the truth, it is necessary at some point in one's life to rid oneself of all the opinions one has ever received and to rebuild one's entire system of knowledge from the very foundation. And I think I've done that recently. Just tossed out. I think this diagnosis of leukemia 2 years ago really helped me to do that and to just say, I'm starting over. I'm going, I'm going here. And I've been doing it in some ways. Many people think I've done it my whole life, but honestly I haven't. I've wallowed around in that ego a lot in my life. Um, And, and so in order to do this thing, you have to recognize that it, it fundamentally involves changing your concept of yourself. And changing your concept of yourself really means understanding what is your concept of yourself. Like, who are you? What is your concept of yourself? Your concept of yourself is everything that you believe to be true about yourself and what's possible for you and anyone else. And it really means changing most of that because you have been raised to be ordinary. You've been raised to believe in your limits and how far you can go. And you've been imp— have this imposed upon you by your well-meaning parents and grandparents and culture and religion and business and education. Uh, the systems that you have been im— immersed into have basically told you, get here. This is not for you. And it might not have even been done. And sometimes they might have even said, oh, you can do anything. And then we'll start to tell you all of the reasons, all of the exceptions to that, that I'm imposing on you. Like you gotta get dressed in a certain way for Mother's Day, and you've got to fit in and you've got to do this. And you, and it's by, by God, it's, um, it's like the soul has No finiteness to it. It, it's infinite. So it means it just wants to keep expanding.
It wants to keep growing. To learn some more incredible Wayne Dyer wisdom, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Good morning.
My name is Wayne Dyer. I'm 68 years old. And I have sex almost every day.
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