The Secret to Finding Your Purpose It’s Not What You Think

The biggest lie you believe is that purpose should feel clear from the start.

We all were born for purpose. Every trees, the moon, rain, snow, everything God created has a purpose. A man has a purpose. And the wise man is he who finds his life purpose. It's a shift of mindset that takes us off from the work mode to the purpose mode. The purpose is what drives you.

In reality, it gets clear only after you take messy, imperfect action.

So many people are obsessed with becoming perfect that they never take action and they never learn to enjoy this moment.

That may be one of the greatest tragedies any of us can face.

In life, you get handed these things and it's not perfect. You know, even today, people want to be handed something perfect, it's not perfect.

Perfection is usually just another word for insecurity.

If you wait for clarity first, you'll stay stuck exactly where you are.

In the next 3 hours, Dr.

Wayne Dyer will show you how to stop searching and start building a life that actually feels like your purpose step by step.

A special thanks to Hay House for partnering with us to release this video exclusively here on my YouTube channel.

If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Dr. Wayne Dyer is joining us live.

Yay!

We're happy because he's been busy. Well, actually, before the show I was teasing you because I said, well, we missed seeing you here. It was so nice to have of you here in the building, you know, you were busily working on the audiobook, which we're all excited about, the new book coming out. And you were a trooper, I have to say.

Boy, I'll tell you, that was a long, long haul.

They work you like crazy. It's from all the hard work. It's from Reid working you like crazy to finish that.

No, it's actually from this morning at 9 o'clock. I was on a 2-hour Skype session. I just got off of it with Carmen over at the Agascu, at the Peter Agascu Center, doing my—

Well, we've had a lot of—

I get a new menu every week.

A lot of interest there. People are asking how you're doing, what's your progress, and—

Yeah.

You've been going pretty good?

The pictures are showing that I'm getting straighter and things are getting aligned. Still have a very serious pain in my neck, but I don't know if that's just one of my 8 kids or if it's just—

Right.

Could be anything there, right?

Well, now that pain's a little lower, but it's—

No, I'm just teasing.

Yeah, it's changing. Right now I just came off of 2 hours of exercises on it, so I'm feeling it. But it's a great program. It's this whole idea that our body is, you know, meant to do everything that's on the left side with the right side, and we just get it out of alignment. And when that stuff starts happening, we have pains, you know, sometimes in our neck, and it's from our hip being, you know, because then we start adjusting and we start leaning a bit forward, and then we lean our head forward and And you multiply that by 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years of doing those kinds of things, and these misalignments take place, right?

You got to get back in balance. But it is amazing how, kind of like in acupuncture, where they'll, you know, put the needle somewhere and you'll feel it in a totally different part of your body, right? You know how we're all connected in that way. But it's amazing.

Our ability—

yeah, it's been wonderful. He's written a book called Pain Free, and it's, uh, And his whole theory is— and he's, you know, he's not a medical doctor, he's not a physical therapist, he just got really interested in the body to trying to heal himself. And then he's the one who Jack Nicklaus credits with keeping him from being in a wheelchair. He was able to help him heal his back. And Tony Robbins also. Those are two people that really have endorsed his work. And so have you, haven't you? That's right.

As well, I've been doing it. My husband was doing it and he was told he had to have surgery, the whole thing. You know, a lot of what they were telling you, you know, and that's scary when they're wanting to cut into your back, you know.

Yes, it's very close to the brain.

Yeah, you want to do everything you can to avoid that situation. So it does work.

So that's what I'm doing. I'm, uh, it's something I just commit to every day, you know. Some people call me obsessive. I started running in 1976 and I ran for 29 years and didn't miss it but one day in 29 years. So, um, I make a commitment to do it and I'm just, I do them every day. Today was 2 hours, yesterday was 3 hours, and it's a fun process.

You're feeling better, so that's the important thing.

Feeling better and getting ready for, uh, the new PBS special, which is, uh, we're going to do it. We're going to air it in San Diego on the 10th and the 11th of December, and then it'll be airing all across the country. It's called I Can See Clearly Now, and it's really a wonderful program.

It's exciting. I've had a lot of people email about that, and also people are asking about the product for the program you just did in Anaheim with Abraham Hicks.

Yeah, that was a great night. Well, you didn't get in there, did you?

No, it was sold out.

It was sold out.

I have no connections.

I have more— I thought I had connections. I couldn't even get people in, right?

They were tight on that.

It was a wonderful 3 hours though. It was— it just went by and like seemed like 5 minutes. Um, so did they tell you anything that really stood out, like Well, one of the things I ask about, because I'm working on another book in my head, which is a book on divine love, which is— I want to take— I want to do with what I did with the Tao Te Ching, you know, change your thoughts, change your life, take each of the 81 verses and write what I think, how you can apply that today in today's world. I want to do that also with another great ancient holy book called the Bhagavad Gita.

Yes.

Which was written right around— it was created right around the same time as the Tao Te Ching. And it's called the It translates to The Song of the Lord, and it's the book that Gandhi based his life upon. And it's an ancient spiritual, you know, Hindu text. But whenever I read it, I just keep thinking this, you know, it seems difficult for a lot of people, and there's a lot of Indian, you know, long terms and words in there and so on. And so I think I'd like to take those 18 chapters in the Bhagavad Gita, and I'd like to write how I believe that we can apply that in today's world, because it's really, it is all about living a God-centered life and coming from a place of God-realization. And I asked Abraham about that, and I said, there's something in the Bhagavad Gita that really concerns me because I've read it like 3 times now in the last few months, just in preparation for— just the way that I prepare to do a writing or a big project like this. And there's a thing in there that's where Krishna, God, which is the Tao, speaking to Arjuna and giving him these incredible secrets about how to live from a place of your divine soul. And but he is also instructed to, by God, by Krishna, to perform his duty. He was getting ready to go to battle and his duty was to go out there and kill people. And in the Bhagavad Gita it speaks to nobody kills anybody, that all life comes from me, comes from God, comes from source and so on. And I just have such an issue with all of that and I'm planning to write about that issue. And maybe— and what Abraham said is, uh, perhaps it's, it's, uh, it needs some revision. Perhaps there's this— I mean, that sounds like a, it's like revising the Bible or something. People sound, you know, that would be— but, uh, it needs to have a new look at it. The world has changed in the last 2,500 years.

And, uh, wow, that would be so amazing.

Yeah, they said that maybe that's what you're here for. Maybe that's what you, you know, you are to look at this and, uh, and give your own take on it. And that's what they said to me.

So, wow, you have to do it now. Yeah, you must.

It was a fascinating— you know what the truth of it is, Diane? I can't remember too much of what happened. I was just so in awe at talking to these ascended masters that just—

well, it's incredible to see, you know, to see Esther do it and what takes place.

And then, you know, what the information that they reveal is really amazing because there's so, you know, there's an awful lot of channels stuff that's out there, and a lot of people see themselves as channelers. But this has been a teaching that I've been following for the last, oh, 25 to 30 years, and it has always, always consistently been on. There's nothing artificial about it.

I think I would love to hear your interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita.

Yeah, well, I've been thinking a lot about it.

People would too.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, right.

A story I like from the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna and he opens his mouth and he can see the whole universe.

Yes.

Yeah. Is this a kind of a neat metaphor? Because you talk about that a lot too, how, right, you know, that everything is within us. Yeah, everything is within us.

The whole idea of oneness, you know, it's, uh, speaking of a love that, uh, and I ask about that is, you know, it's like when we leave our bodies, is that we enter into a world of love where there is no opposite, where it's just nothing but love. And they said yes, that is it. And it's very hard for us to comprehend that in, in our duality because Everything in this physical plane has an opposite. But when you're in a world where there's nothing but love, you know, there's no anger, there's no hatred, there's no rage, there's no violence, there's no killing, there's no wars. There's, you know, which is again what sort of what the Tao says. But it's like we can get that violence out of our hearts, you know, out of our hearts. We can get it out of our lives as well.

Very interesting. So did you want to say maybe a Thanksgiving message? You know, I can't believe Thanksgiving is Thursday.

I always say on Thanksgiving that there's two words 2 words in there. I fast on Thanksgiving. It's something I've been doing for years. I'm in a cleanse right now. I'm in the second day of a 10-day cleanse. But I always, for many, many years, I fasted on Thanksgiving because there's 2 words in that holiday. One is thanks, and that's gratitude. To be in a state of gratitude is a place to remind yourself at all times, you know, and not just in a state of gratitude for, for the people who smell good and agree with you and tell you all the nice things, but to be in a state of gratitude for everything. If you've got an illness, if you've got a sore neck like I do, if you've got problems in your family, if you've got addictions or whatever, to be grateful in a sense of saying there's something here for me to learn, there's a teaching here. And instead of cursing it and being upset about it and wishing that it weren't there— I'll give you an example. I have a dear friend, her name is Carrie, and she's in nursing training, and she's got her RN, but she's going for her bachelor's degree. And so they had told her that on Wednesday of this— the day before— and she's a single mom with two children. And lives here on Maui. And she was told that— and she cannot say no if she wants the credits, that she wants to graduate, if she wants to get her degree— that she is going to have to serve homeless people on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and help them by washing their feet and washing their hands, rather, and administering to them as a nurse and just being there and serving them all day on a Wednesday. And it's required. And when we were talking about it, she was just so upset about it because she's a single mom. She's got two young girls and she wants to get ready for Thanksgiving and she has to spend like 6 or 8 hours just serving homeless people and helping them to wash their wounds and, you know, and all of that. And she was going through all the reasons why this was making her upset. And I asked her to just stop. I said, and reminded her that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. I said, I am so humbled by what you have been asked to do. And instead of you saying you know, this isn't fair and I shouldn't have to do this and why me and all of that. You should really be— you might want to think in terms of what an honor it is to be in a place where you can be out there just serving others. I said, I think of Saint Francis, I think of Jesus, I think of Mother Teresa, and these divine human beings who lived here in human form who would just go out and serve. They would wash the feet of others and they would, you know, embrace them and and so on. And so for you, for a few hours, this is going to be one of the great experiences of your life. And instead of being angry about it, just be saying thank you and thank you. And I said, and I just want to know that I am so touched by what— that you are doing this, that you are willing to go and do this— that I, uh, I sent $1,000 to her in the mail. Wow. This is just my expression of love that I have for the opportunity that you have to. And I ask if Perhaps maybe I might join her and do some of that myself with her and help her, help her out and, you know, just reach out to people who are, you know, so that story just comes to mind just now. We just talked about it. And then when we hung up the phone, it was the other night. She said, I just, I just want to thank you. She said, you took all of the anger and all of the hurt and the bitterness that I was feeling about being required to do this when I'm already an RN and I just trying to, you know, get the credits for my degree. And she said, it's just like, I'm just going to make it a wonderful experience. So that's thanks. And the other word in this holiday is giving, and it's really about giving. So that's why I fast, so that whatever I would be spending on whatever food I would be eating and so on, rather than, you know, how we are so often gluttonous and so on, and our way of showing appreciation is by just overeating. And you know, that, that whole sort of syndrome that goes with Thanksgiving, that, you know, that wasted, tired, you know, want to go to sleep feeling up from overeating. I just, whatever it is that I would spend, I'd go out and do something for other people. So it's like Be in a state of gratitude and be in a state of giving, and then you'll understand what this real meaning of this holiday is, right?

So true. And I bet that your friend, you know, after she does that, she's going to feel, you know, what she gets back will be tenfold. She's going to feel so much.

And that's why I said I just put $1,000 in the mail to her. I said, this is just a little bit of the munificence that is going to show up for you in your life as a result of serving. And that's what it teaches in the Tao Te Ching, you know, stay low. Stay, be radically humble. Like, compare yourself to the ocean. The ocean is always stays low because it knows, it knows that all of the rivers and all of the streams will ultimately just come to it. It'll just come to it, you know. Stay in that state, in that state. And that's where all the power is. The power is in the ocean and not in the streams and so on. So anyway, great, that's a beautiful message. Thanksgiving thing. Yeah, it was. I'm just glad I just remembered that now. Thanks for bringing that up.

Well, we have a lot of people, yeah, that want to talk to you. I'm— oh sure, the board is full, and I'm sure the holiday approaching, probably some people with family things going on. But, um, let's see, let's start. Where should we go? How about Shelley in Oregon, online too? Sounds like a nice place, Cottage Grove, Oregon. And Shelley, you're on the air with Dr. Dyer.

Hi, Diane. You have to—

hi.

Soothing voice.

Thank you, Wayne.

So good to talk to you. I was so grateful to participate in the live stream last week with you speaking to Abraham.

Oh my goodness, you were there, huh?

Well, I wasn't there. I was on— I was on the live stream, but still I felt like I was there.

How did it come out? You're the first person I've talked to other than just a few friends.

I got to—

did you?

A couple of other people too, which, you know, afterwards, which was just amazing. So yeah, thank you for arranging that. For years I used to say that if I had to choose a father, it would be either you or Charles Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie. That is, until I heard the story you told about your daughter Serena when she said, well, I must have been in a hurry.

Yes, right. Yeah, that's not a great line.

Anyway, I—

yeah, well, by the way, that will be made into a product. It's going to be, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna put it in that whole thing with Abraham. It's going to be great. We're going to make a little book out of it, and I think a DVD and all that, because I mean, just talking to someone who's coming from a place where you just can't talk them out of it, you know what I mean? It was like when I talked at the end about the GMOs and about the modified food and how all of that, and I kept talking about all the things I didn't like, and I just thought, well, at least they should agree with me. And I said, 99% of the pineapples or whatever it is here on Maui you know, are GMOs. And she said, well, then find the 1%. Taste it.

Yes, that was quite pleasing, actually. I really enjoyed that a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, and I love, I love Esther's teaching. I love the teachings. I've been listening for years too. I've been listening to you for years. I've been listening to Deepak and Eckhart, and I love it. And I'm really an inspired person creating art and music. I'm fortunate enough to actually make a living doing what I love in this tiny Oregon town that I live in. So things are going really well. I've created a warm, inviting, colorful life for myself. My trickiest situation that I've always wondered, what would I actually ask you if I got to talk to you? Because usually the answers always come. But the trickiest situation is with my significant other. We've been together for over 16 years, off and on with breakups, due in part to him being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and all the addictions and the manic kind of destructiveness that goes hand in hand with that. I've struggled to stay centered for years and have good boundaries and alignment and all of that, but having that kind of up and down continually in my life and home makes it so difficult to stay in balance. I totally love him, but I also love to have peace and calm, and so I like to choose the high-flying vibration.

Right.

He struggles with his own emotions and he doesn't accept the idea of an emotional scale and choice because of his disorder. He uses that— I mean, I don't want to say as an excuse. But you know, as the reason. So hearing that you and your wife have been separated for many years made me think, well, how do you make the decision that it doesn't work to live together even if you really, totally, deeply love that person? Or I'm trying to figure out what's often my own attraction that I can change to make my home life better with him.

Well, two things come to mind, Shelley. One is get your significant other to get gluten out of his life if you can. You know, get him into a gluten-free world because there's a real connection between the food that we eat and these kind of disorders.

So honestly, I've been gluten-free for 20 years before it was such a thing. I've been doing it for 20 years, so he sort of does with me, but not fully yet.

Yeah, that can make an impact. It really can. I mean, there's more and more studies showing that the high increase in these kinds of, you know, mental disorders are, you know, also related to the kinds of things that we're doing to our food supply. I mean, don't get me off on a rant on that.

That's funny. I honestly, I really can't necessarily get him to do anything because he's not really of the same mind design, right? Alternative ideas, right?

Yeah. And the second thing is when you ask about my wife and I and so on, and the truth of it is that, um, that was probably the low point in my— one of the low points in my life, if not the low point in my life. And I stayed in a low point for a while. So I guess what I have learned from that is if I were to do something like that again, I would do it not from a perspective of going through a year or two of almost depression myself as a result of this breakup. And understand that whatever it is, whatever choices that I'm making, if I'm being, you know, sent in a direction of having to, you know, take that high-flying disc, you know, that you're talking about, you know, to go for, you know, for going for just feeling good, you know, I want to feel good. I mean, that's the message on my cell phone forever, you know, I want to feel good. Feeling good is the same as feeling God, and that you have a right to do that. And instead of going through this guilt thing about, you know, how painful that would be and so on, to do it from a place of love, to just— and that's what my wife and I finally were able to pull off. And I talk to her almost every day, you know, and we have a very, very close loving relationship. And also coming from a place that it's like, I don't need to have another person next to me in the traditional sense that maybe this whole society defines, in order for me to fulfill my own dharma and to live the life that I want to live. I can do that from a separate place and still love this person unconditionally. And that's the place that I would go to.

I really would.

It gets tripped up because, you know, when things are so chaotic and all of that, those are the hard times. But when things are going well, it's like wonderful to be in his company.

So, mm-hmm. Perhaps, but I think, you know, I think Khalil Gibran had it right in The Prophet. He said, let there be spaces in your togetherness. And he said, let the oceans roar in those spaces. In other words, make those spaces big. I mean, you know, you've got only you know what you feel inside and what you're here for and whether you're being inhibited from really fulfilling what it is that you signed up for, what you showed up here for. If so much of it is on, you know, having to deal with the downside of his bipolarism or his manic depression. And you can do it all from a place of love. So you come, Shelley, from a place of divine love with your significant other and let the oceans roar in those spaces. You know, it might be really good for him too if he didn't have an outlet. Very often people who have these, you know, the downtimes when they're alone, a lot of times it's done just for what kind of a reaction it's going to get. It becomes a power play, you know. And if you're not there to be the recipient of it or to even be the observer of it, it might even be helpful to him.

Yeah, good, good. Thank you.

Yeah, you're very welcome.

I really appreciate that. It's so wonderful to talk to you.

Thanks, Shelly. God bless you. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you.

Namaste.

How about Tamara on line 1 in San Diego? And thanks for holding, Tamara. You're on with Dr. Dyer today.

Hi, Dr. Dyer.

Hi there, how are you?

I'm great, thank you so much for taking my call.

You're very welcome.

Well, I'm just calling to say I want to personally thank you because you shared about how when you write a book you start off with the COVID and you begin at the end and then you work your way back to the beginning. And I did the same thing, like I tried it and it really helped me to finish because I could see what I wanted my finished product to be like and what I wanted my audience to experience and so forth. But I just want to say thank you because it helped me get through the process. And I still have my mock-up next to me, and I also have my finished product, and I've sold 80 copies already.

And good for you!

Thank you. And I'm so proud, and I just feel I feel inspired, like I have friends around me who want to do the same thing, and I can pass along what I learned from you, and I'm just so grateful, and I'm glad I got to talk to you right before Thanksgiving because you really, really inspired me, and thank you so, so, so much.

Oh, you're so welcome. It's a fascinating idea, this, um, you know, it's like assuming the feeling of a wish already being fulfilled, you know, just, um, that's what Wishes Fulfilled is really about. That was the great teaching for me. Me in reading Neville's work and inspired me to write that book was this idea of placing something into your imagination, that everything that now exists, you know, was once imagined. When the reverse of that is that everything that you would like to exist must be first imagined. And the problem that most of us have is that we can't put into our imagination things that we've— our subconscious mind has been conditioned to believe is not possible, you know. So we've been really almost conditioned from the time that we're little boys and little girls, very little, to understand what our limitations are and to see all the reasons that you can't do this and you can't do that and, and, uh, and so on. It's, um, you know, my, uh, I have a real close friend here on the island named Tiffany, and she's got a little girl named Mohea. And she lost yesterday or the day before, she lost her, um, her folder for the year and all of her assignments in it and so on. And I was on the phone with her and talking to her, and I was telling her, well, let's see, you can call, you know, one of your friends in the classroom, and perhaps they'll be able to give you the notes. And she said, well, this one doesn't have a phone, and that one can't do this, and that one's not home. And I kept saying to her, instead of you putting all of your mind and attention on what can't be done, on who can't, let's think of the one person in the room. Just like Abraham said to me, let's find the one avocado that isn't GM mode, and let's focus on that. So put your attention on what it is that you want to manifest. And that's one of the things that Maslow taught me when I was a young doctoral student, is that self-actualizing people never place anything into their imagination that they do not want to manifest. So they don't go around saying, you know, with my luck things aren't going to work out, or I won't find her, or it's not going to happen, or I can't do this. They see it as already completed. It's fascinating you would ask about this. I don't know if you heard the beginning of the show. Yes. When I talk about the Bhagavad Gita and writing about that. So here's a letter, here's a little piece of a letter that I got, um, the day before yesterday in the mail from somebody at a lecture that I had given in December of 2009 for this corporation. And he told me about how so many people had been helped and so on. And then he had this comment. And now you have to understand, this is something that I've already been just putting into place, and this is from someone I haven't heard from since 2009. So that's like 4 years ago. It says, we continue to read your books and to hear the audio as well. I am sure that you are already working on the next book. However, I wanted to make a request in case you were considering ideas for a future book. I wanted to propose interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita as an option. You have done a great job distilling the Tao teachings in an easy-to-understand fashion. I have struggled as an Indian man to find similar interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita. Although there are literal translations and interpretations available, they're not the most easy to understand. I am positive you can make a big impact in this arena similar to the track. What I'm saying is that when you place something into your imagination and you begin to act on that and act on it as if it already were a completed project, the energy just sort of flows into me. I picked up that letter, I was reading it, and I was thinking, this is somebody who's tuned into— this is somebody I haven't seen for 4 years, and he's from India. Which is where the Bhagavad Gita originated. So it's like you— what you do is when you start to use your imagination in the way that you just did in the creation of your own book, what you do is you, you align yourself with this, the sources, you know, of, and the energy to bring you experiences that match up to what you've already got placed in your imagination, which is the only place that anything can ever get created from. So it's like this wonderful awareness that if I keep my thoughts on what it is that I intend to manifest and what I want for myself and assume that it's already a completed project, you know, then whatever it is that I need to have that make, you know, the money will show up, the right people will, the circumstances that, you know, all of it, even you talking on this phone. So tell us, tell me about your book and let's give it a plug to several hundred thousand people. What's it called?

It's called Journey to Juneteenth: Collected Writings, and it's a collection of short stories. There's some poetry tree, and it's all inspired by the holiday Juneteenth, you know, began in Texas. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation was set in place in 1863, but not all slaves were released until 1865. Until Juneteenth is June 19th, the day that celebrates when finally— okay, slavery.

And what's the website so people can know about it? Say it clearly.

Okay, it's journey to juntenth.weebly.com, and it's also on Amazon.

So it's Journey to Juneteenth?

Yes, sir.

Okay, just look that up and you'll see what, uh, is it— what is your first name?

Is Tamara?

Tamara? Or Tamara? Tamara?

Yes, Tamara.

Tamara, I look forward to meeting you in person, my dear.

Me too, Dr. Dyer. Thank you, and thank you, Diane.

Oh, sure. Thanks for calling.

God bless you.

That's so great, her first book, and she used your method of doing the, the mock-up, like working from the end.

That's such a great, uh, yeah, you have to do that with everything. You have to do that with your illnesses, you have to do that with your parking places, you have to do that with the finances. You know, understand that the, you know, everything is energy. I mean, that's what Abraham speaks about. Everything is energy. That's, uh, law of attraction. And if you're thinking about what you don't want Don't be surprised if more of what you don't want just keeps showing up in your life because you've got it programmed in there. And what I think is that we can take this to an extreme and just say that, you know, we've been programmed to believe that we can't perform miracles, you know, and that we, you know, we can't heal people and so on. You know, when the most famous lines of Jesus is, even the least among you can do all that I have done and even greater things. It's within each and every one of us. But you just can't put your thoughts, which is the currency for attracting things into your life, on what you don't want or what always has been. You can't even put your thoughts on what is if you don't like what is. If your life is going in a certain way and you don't like it and you're thinking about it all the time, you're just attracting more of the energy to perpetuate what's going on in your life. When you shift, when you change the way you look at it, then what you're looking at just begins to to change. It's such a simple process, and there's so much conditioning in the opposite direction.

So if you have that focus and then you align, the things will align to match up with that energetically.

Yeah. This thing that I'm talking about with the Bhagavad Gita, you know, 8 years ago it was the Tao, and I kept seeing it everywhere. I read a million little pieces. The Tao was mentioned all over James Fry's book. I was in a restaurant that had a Tao theme in Las Vegas. I would turn on television and something about the Tao would come up. My friend Stuart Wilde, who passed away, this past year, but he was the one who introduced me to the Tao. He called me and mentioned the Tao to me. I mean, it was like, it was just, it was these continuous kind of things. And now when I'm speaking about the Bhagavad Gita, which is, you know, truly it's a humbling experience for me to even think about having the audacity to take a holy book that is 2,500 years old and to write my own interpretation of what I think it might mean today. But obviously, even receiving this letter from this gentleman who's from India, his name is Rupa Gandhi Makia, you know, and it's totally in alignment with what I'm, you know, just sort of being called to do. And there are callings and there's energy and it's always at work, it's always at play and pulling you in a direction. But your thoughts along the way are, oh, I can't do that, or that would be too expensive, or, you know, my parents wouldn't like it, or I can't do that because of these circumstances. And And immediately then you attract more of, I can't do that, or, you know, the anguish that comes with believing that things aren't possible.

Right.

That makes so much sense too.

Yeah.

When you explain it, then it's easy to understand. Makes so much sense. Very good.

That's a calling that I've had, Diane. That's really a calling I've had since I wrote Erroneous Zones, you know, way, way back in the '70s.

So this will be the next one for sure.

Well, it's on its way. I'm, uh, I, and I already know the date that I'm going to be starting it. And, um, you know, so that's exciting. I'm starting at December 4th, actually. Not the actual writing, I'm just starting to, I'm starting to let him know. He knows already.

He knows. Oh, that's amazing. So let's see, where should we go next? Let's go to British Columbia and go to Janice, and she's on line 9. Janice in Cranbrook, BC. And Janice, thanks for holding.

Hello.

Hi, Janice.

How are you?

I'm great today. How are you?

Oh, I've been better, to tell you the truth. Oh, but, um, I'm, I'm hoping, I'm hoping to get down to the core of what I think is the problem here, is that for some reason or other, even though I have lots to be thankful for a lot. I just don't feel worthy of it. Or if I do get things, I feel guilty for them.

Hmm.

So to tell you the truth, I'm off of work for a while because I've injured my arm doing my work, and I'm, I'm in a quandary about what this means. And I know you're supposed to be thankful for everything that shows up, And I've had that happen.

We only have so much time, so it's like, you know, and I want to see if I can address a little bit of that.

Yeah.

All right, so let's just have a little discussion. Do you believe that there is intelligence behind life?

Yes.

That there's some kind of force that, that brings things from— that seduces things from the formless into the form, that brings things from the world of spirit into the world of form? That there's something, you know, Max Planck called it the, the matrix of all matter, you know, all the— and he was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century— that no matter what, when we look at it, we know that things come from the invisible to the visible. So you do believe there is an intelligence behind all of life?

Absolutely.

Okay, so that whatever that intelligence is, or whatever you call it— we call it God or soul or the Tao or Yeah, yeah, so we call it God, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you call it. The opening line of the Tao says the Tao that can be named is not the Tao, because as soon as you put a name on it, now you got two things. You got the name and the thing, and it's now you've divided it. So we'll call it this energy God, so that every creation comes into this world comes from that intelligence, right? And that every creation that comes from that intelligence must have all of that intelligence that it came from into it.

What if you don't feel like you have it though?

But you couldn't have been created otherwise.

Oh, okay.

Because you see, you came from a divine intelligence. You didn't come from your parents. You came from, you know, the seed that began you. The seed had to come from something invisible. Everything comes from energy, so that the intelligence from which all things come has to be in completely whole in all of its creations, because this is what you came from. So the intelligence that you are, the invisibleness that allows you to speak, Janice, and to listen and to process and all of that is really coming from this invisible intelligence. And all of it is located in every single one of its creations, in every caterpillar, in every tree, in every human being. It came from this matrix of all matter, this intelligence.

Okay.

So that you have all of the intelligence of your creator within you. And you have these thoughts that somehow you're not worthy of attracting or having things into your life, when in fact you are God. You are a part of that creation. You came from that intelligence. So you must be like what you came from. And what you came from is this perfect love. So if you could talk to this intelligence, you know, if you could just have a conversation with it, uh, and ask it Is Janice worthy? This perfect divine love, which is all it is, it's just divine love, it's just perfect love from what you emanated, can only say to you, you are divine love. That's what, you know, you're part of my creation, and I can only create from what I am, and what I am is perfect love. So that's what you are. So how is it possible for you to not be worthy if you understand that there is an intelligence behind all of life And you are that intelligence.

Because I guess I've made mistakes along the way.

Yeah. What you've done is, you know, God is still always just at home. It's we that go for walks. You know, we go for walks away from it. We take on something called an ego and we edge God out and we start believing that we are how many things that we accumulate and how much work we do and how well we're received and how people like us. And we start believing all of this nonsense. You know, and I just believe. Yeah. And all you have to do, Janice, is just realize that when you trust in yourself, you're trusting in the wisdom that created you. And the wisdom that created you is your source of being, and it is divine love. It's love with no opposites. It's the same love you'll experience the minute that you leave this body and enter into another realm.

You know, thank you.

Life is earnest, life is real, and the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth was not written of the soul. The soul— that's from Longfellow— the soul is who you are, and it's perfect and it's divine. And if you were to ask God, am I worthy, God would have to respond, how could you be anything other than that? Otherwise you wouldn't exist because you came from me. I guess once you get that, once— and what everybody listening, when you get that, when you have a recognition, that interiority of yours, that, that, uh, that is formless, that all it wants to do is expand because it's infinite. And when anything that's infinite doesn't— can't be stopped, you can't— the minute you stop it, it's not infinite, it's finite. And the soul is infinite, and that's who you are. And all you want to do is just expand and grow. And there's no mistakes in there. There's none at all, you know. And if you could understand that, it's the importance of feeling, uh, if you read, have you read Anita Moorjani's book Dying to Be Me?

No, I haven't actually. No.

What she learned in her, uh, in her near-death experience is that, um, the only thing you have to do is to treasure your magnificence, to recognize how incredibly magnificent you are. And what a creation you are. And you are a creation of love. And everything that shows up for you, you are completely and totally entitled to. God bless you, my dear.

Same to you.

And we have time probably for at least another call. Okay, let's go to Michelle on line 3 in Vegas. Hello there, Michelle.

Hi, Michelle.

Hello. Hello. I think this is marvelous. You're great people and you've made a tremendous difference in my life.

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you. It makes me feel very, very good just to know that.

And I have a life that I have nothing to be sad about, but I need to be shaken by the shoulders, kicked in the pants, or hugged. But I don't know which of the above, because I have some forgiveness issues with family members. I feel like it's happened or healed, and that— but I have thoughts or things that occur that I think And maybe my ego's a little too sneaky or smart.

Welcome to a very big club, Michelle. You know, it includes all of humanity. You know, it's that, that ego, that the whole— it seems to me the whole journey is really to learn how to just tame this ego. I don't think we can get out of it completely, although I'm not certain of that, but we need to really tame it. And those people that you have issues with forgiveness, you know, it's like you don't forgive, uh, for anybody but yourself, you know. And if you really love yourself and really think that you're really terrific, which you are, although I don't know what the hell you're doing in Vegas, but anyway, that's— that's another—

and that is a big— yeah, I'm working like crazy not to be.

Yes, that's the only place in the country that, boy, I just always cannot wait to go someplace else. But it's, uh, you know, but a lot of people just love it. But do you know, it's like you're this, uh, you're this holy divine being, you know, and so you forgive whoever they are, you know. I mean The— an act of forgiveness turned my entire life around. It was once— it was like if I had to pick the signature moment in my life, it was August 30th, 1974, Biloxi, Mississippi, standing on my father's grave. The man who walked out on us and abandoned me and never even made a phone call, never even showed any care towards me whatsoever, was the greatest teacher in my life. We did a film, and it was the act of going to his grave where I went to his grave to piss on his grave. I was so upset when angry at this man. And I ended up leaving and changing my whole life around. I mean, my writing changed. I got myself in shape. I stopped drinking. Everything turned around when I got the rage or the anger out. And right now I feel like he's, you know, he's even a part of this conversation. You know, I feel his loving energy around me. And who knows in a universe in which, you know, all things are possible that he didn't incarnate into this planet, behave just exactly the way he did so that I, his youngest son, could learn how to forgive him and teach millions of other people to do the same. Who knows? You know, it's all possible. It's all possible.

Well, thank you.

So yeah, you're very, very welcome.

Yeah, I'll work on it.

How did you get to Vegas? How did you get to— how did you end up staying in Vegas? I didn't know anybody lived there.

Yeah, I know, neither did I. Um, Buddha's— there's Buddha laughter in this. Um, I went into a financial crunch and took a job here, and there's a little spiritualness to the game. And yeah, I'm trying to get back to Southern California as quickly as possible.

No, I shouldn't be putting down Vegas. I, you know, I've had many, many wonderful— in fact, when I mentioned the restaurant, Diane, I mentioned about the Dao. It was in one of the, uh, one of the hotels. Yeah, one of the hotels there. They have a restaurant called In Vegas, yeah.

I got married by Elvis in Vegas.

You got married by Elvis?

I did, at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel.

Really? Drive-through wedding?

No, it wasn't drive-through. For $200, you can get the hound dog package. That's what I did, and it worked out great. So I have a son.

How long have you been married to this guy?

Uh, about, uh, 4 or 5 years now.

Is that right? Wow.

Yeah, yeah. Vegas.

Wow. Drive through the drive-through, huh?

That probably would have been cheaper.

Yeah, you ain't nothing but a hound dog crying all the time.

I'll be singing.

And you ain't no friend of mine.

Well, thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We love you all.

That's right. And just for all the ladies that think you can't get married after 40, yes, you can.

Yeah, you ain't nothing but a hound dog.

If you so desire, you can.

You got the hound dog package?

I did.

I love it. I have more respect for you now than I ever did. See you next week.

Dr. Dyer joining us. How are you today?

Just fine, just fine.

I feel like I'm scrambling, I'm like juggling today, I'm running around. Let's get started. Let's go to Alex in Portland, Oregon, and welcome to the show, Alex. You're on with Dr. Dyer.

Oh, thank you, and aloha, Dr. Dyer.

Aloha to you, my friend.

I just know one of these days I'm gonna be over there running the Maui Marathon and you're gonna be on the side of the road cheering us on somewhere.

So I want to be happy to do that.

I might be right on the road with you, you never know. I've run 7 of those and I've been thinking about running another one, so we'd love to have you come back.

Yeah, it's your inspiration that keeps so many of us going.

I, uh, well, thank you.

And also to your health, you're in my prayers.

And I was glad to have you visiting Portland here about a year or so ago.

I want to ask two questions. One is, you were traveling with a gal from Hawaii who was an amazing singer and was selling her CDs when you were traveling. Do you remember who she was?

Was it my daughter?

Um, no, it wasn't your daughter. It was a gal who, um, She talked about her son. She played guitar. You had her up on stage.

Oh yes. Oh, I do not recall her name, but I'll— someone will call it in, or as soon as I see it, I'm looking to find some of her music. So yeah, she was a great, great singer. Yes. Um, I do not recall her name, but we'll find it.

The other one will.

The other part was one of the things that in, in working with some athletes, it's, it's tough, especially in these times when you know what you want, you can see what you want, and you're just waiting for the signs to come. You're just waiting, trying to be patient, but it's learning the patience side of it, which is what I would say you teach some of the best of. And I'm— my big question is, is, is what can we do to more see and look for and be more patient for things to come to us?

I think probably the, the answer to that is to remember that, um, you can't want and have at the same time. So, um, wanting is a state in which you are saying to yourself or saying to the universe, I don't have, I don't have it already. When you're in a state of I have, I have it already, um, wanting becomes an impossibility. So it's being in that state of, uh, it's so hard to describe that I'm going to write about this and try to get more detail into this. It's a very fascinating topic. It's the idea of the power of our imagination, you know, that everything that exists in the world, everything that exists physically in the world, was once imagined. So just that simple little statement— that was from William Blake— all that is was once, once was once just thought of. You begin to recognize that anything that you, quote, want, in order for you to get it, you have to have it in your imagination, because that's how things get here. That's the creative process. It starts with a thought. It starts with that. So that when you can do that in your imagination, see yourself as having already what it is that you think has been missing, just like know it and see it there. And then I think the thing, if you're asking for help on that, the thing that you have to do is go to the place within your, in your imagination, which already has what it is that you now think to be missing. You're living it in your imagination. And you begin to act from that place rather than from this place of things aren't here, they're not where I would want them to be, and so on. Begin to say to yourself, it's all perfect, it's exactly the way it's supposed to be. In my imagination, it's here. And then every time that subject matter comes up of the thing that you think is missing, instead of using the attention that, uh, that says it's not here, I don't have it yet, it's probably not going to happen, it's going to be too difficult, it's going to be too expensive, the right people aren't going to show up, all of that kind of thinking, which is really the kind of thinking that keeps you from really being able to manifest. Instead, you go to a different way of thinking, which is, uh, I already go to the place in my— I always go to the place in my imagination where it would be. That's why when I sit down to write a book, I already— I wrap the COVID around the book before I even write the first word, so that I look at it and realize that it's already here in my imagination. All I have to do is act upon that. And as I act upon that, the book is now in the process of being created, even though it already exists in my imagination, right? And that's sort of the beginning of wishes fulfilled. But it's that whole— every time you have a statement that says, 'I want,' you're saying, 'I don't already have.' And the fact is, and if you do say, 'I already have it,' then you stay in a state of gratitude for it. You know, you just stay in a state of gratitude for it, and you just stay in that place. And that's how really highly functioning people get things done, truly. I mean, the self-actualizing people that I know, and speaking about my own self throughout my entire life, I've always had that knowing. And you mentioned patience earlier, that, you know, in the Course it says that infinite patience produces immediate results. And infinite patience is just another word for knowing, you know. It's like if you have infinite patience, it means you're just patient forever. That means you already know. You already know. And once you have a knowing, Alex, once you have that knowing, what happens is that, um, you're at peace. You're just at peace with it, you know. And that's basically all we want. That's all any of us want. It isn't that we need a new watch or we need a new car or we need to have a new trophy on our case or a new win or anything like that. We just want to go through our life and be content and be happy and, you know, live that contentment, live that peace. And you get that by having that infinite patience, which sounds like a contradiction but it's really not. No, that makes sense.

No, it makes wonderful sense, and you hit it right on the head for me, which clicks, and that's the want side of it. I teach some cycling classes back here in the Northwest, and one thing, when you take somebody for a 2-hour ride on a stationary bike that never leaves where it's sitting, right, and they want to go right away, they want to sprint right away on that bike, and you have to keep pulling them back and because they want to get into what you're going to do. And you're exactly right. I'm trying to back them up and saying, let's visualize where we're going first.

Mm-hmm.

And then all of a sudden they get the experience.

Yeah.

And then you're there. And so that each time you pump the pedal, that's the present moment. That's all that you get. You know, all of us, that's all any of us get. We just get this present moment. We get the now.

Wow.

And when you're in that state, when you just stay in that state, It's like, use your imagination. You know, Einstein said that imagination is far superior to knowledge. You know, it's like if people could just recognize that everything that ever existed or does exist right now in this universe in the physical sense was first a thought, was first an imagination, then everything that you would like to have come is also— it has to start in the imagination. And when you get it in the imagination and act from that, you know, Neville called this the Law of Assumption, that you assume that what it is that you would like to have, uh, show up is already here. You assume that ultimately you now align with the forces in the universe that say, here's how creation is going to take place. It's how I do it. That's how I do it with everything in my life.

Well, thank you so much.

Thanks, Alex. God bless you, my friend.

And, uh, Dr. Dyer, let's go to this one call here. Connie who's calling from Michigan. She wanted to say hello. Connie, you're on with Dr. Wayne Dyer.

Hello, Dr. Dyer. Thanks for taking my call. This is Connie Fidel.

I know who this is. Hi, Connie. How are you?

I'm fantastic. I want you to know David is also— I saw him this morning. He's working regularly at the pantry. Him and Janet were both there, and I just want to express my gratitude for sending him to me because we've created quite a bond and friendship, and, and I know it was through you that that happened. And yeah, Connie is speaking about that.

Yeah, David is my brother who lived with me through all of the hard times, uh, in the earliest years when we were in foster homes and orphanages and so on. And we slept in the same bed together until we were about 14. And I gave a lecture in Detroit a couple of years ago, and this lady who's on the phone is really an angel. Uh, she really is. My brother has Parkinson's disease. He's in his 70s, and it was on pretty serious. And I started talking a little bit about yoga, and Connie offered to have David, my brother Dave, who won the Bronze Star, the fourth highest award you can get for valor and bravery in Vietnam, and probably where he contacted the early beginnings of his Parkinson's, which is showing up now in his life. And Connie, who I'm speaking to right now, offered David free yoga classes and has been giving him free yoga classes, never takes any money for it. And works— when mentioned the pantry— works at feeding people in southeastern Michigan at the food banks and just is one of those people that can't do enough and is always serving. So Connie, I'm just thrilled to talk to you here this morning. What's on your mind?

It's interesting how you turned it around because I was calling to give you the gratitude for introducing David to me, and he just recently wrote a new story called An Inspirational Story, which is really touching. Every story that he writes now brings tears to my eyes. And to see him go from taking shuffling steps to find within him— because the yoga isn't so much what I gave him, it's what he had within him to connect to, to find his own healing.

And my brother was—

go ahead.

And that's what yoga is. And I was fortunate enough to have illness lupus several years ago that brought me to find yoga, to find the stillness within, to help me with my own healing. And that's why now I share that with others that are going through experiencing some type of stress-related, which is a common term in our American society, illness. And that's where most of these illnesses come from. So I'm grateful to have him as a part of my life, and you obviously who brought him to me. At one of your seminars.

So, well, that's so kind and so thoughtful of you. That— yeah, I'm a big supporter of yoga. I do it myself. I've been doing it for 5 years. It has been hugely instrumental in helping me. In fact, I'm an inch taller than I was 5 years ago, literally. I was 6'1" my whole life, and, and now I'm 6'2". My whole spine has stretched out. And I sit and watch over here on Maui, I watch people walk by where I live here on Kanapali Beach, and And I look at the people as they get into their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and I see them walking. I said, that person needs to do yoga. That person needs to do yoga. You can see them as they lean forward. You can see how their spines are atrophying and so on. And the word yoga, of course, means union, and it really refers to union with your source, union with God. It's truly, for those of you out there who are struggling with back issues, with, you know, with disc issues, with any kind of health issues, Find a yoga place and get out there and make things happen. The interesting thing, Connie, as you call, when I think about my brother David, my brother was very, very shy when he was young and he was very sickly when he was young. He had anemia and so on and he's 17 months older than I am, but he was smaller and, you know, we were together all the time and he got very quiet and for a period of time in his life he got very heavy into alcohol and drinking and we'll talk about this. Didn't express himself very much and so on. Went into the military, spent 20-some years in the military, went to Vietnam. And when he got this Parkinson's, something happened, something transformed in him. And he became— because I always thought of my brother David as this brilliant guy who created his own language. You could give him any word. I could give him the word refrigerator right now and he could spell it backwards just as fast as you could spell it forward. He had this wonderful creative mind. But he never really believed in it. And in the last 2 or 3 years, he's written, I think, 20 or 30 essays. He's writing all the time. He's expressing himself brilliantly. He talks now where he used to be very difficult to get words to come out of him. Now he talks endlessly. It's like everything is sort of coming out for him at this time in his life. And I really attribute a lot of it to you, Connie, and the work that you are doing together. You've become like his best friend as well as his yoga instructor and raising money for good causes and doing volunteer work All things that my brother never did. He drank a lot of beer, smoked cigarettes, let all of that go. He and his wife Janet and their son David Scott. I'm so glad you called.

Thank you so much. They're great people.

Yeah, they are great people.

Yeah, very. And I think a lot of that might have been just numbing from his past experiences. And now he's living from that place of joy, that place of light that's within him. And you can see it and radiate abundance just in his smile and his actions and the way he reacts with others and giving up his time. And the more we, you know, I mean, who am I talking to? Of course you know this. The more we give out, the more we get back.

But it's interesting because there's thousands of people listening here right now and hundreds of thousands of people. And it's very interesting. A lot of them are people in their 60s and 70s and 80s and so on. And they think, well, you know, my life is pretty much now completed and so on. And your life can do a complete and total turnaround, a dramatic turnaround.

Absolutely.

At any time.

He started it in '69, I guess it was, with his yoga practice, and now he's 72 and in much better health than he had been probably in his 50s, 60s.

That's absolutely true. And he also doesn't drink. He's given up all alcohol whatsoever. All dramatic, dramatic changes that have taken place. And he's now this accomplished writer who sends me these essays all the time.

Wait till you see his latest, because most of them are tear-jerkers, but this one was just phenomenal in my opinion. They keep getting better. As he continues to do them, and they inspire me. And he is just a very inspirational human being on this earth, and we need to keep finding more of us out there. And the more of us that connect, as you say, like the branches of a tree, the better our earth and planet is going to be for it. So thank you for what you do, and thank you. Thank you so much.

Namaste.

Thank you, Connie, for a beautiful call. I got tears in my eyes right now.

Well, earlier, you know, you were talking about allowing, and I noticed a couple of the calls here, people are kind of struggling with being in a state of allowance. So I wanted to see if you could address that next. And let's go to Cecily, or Cecily, I hope I said your name right there. Line 6, calling from Charlotte, North Carolina, and welcome to the show.

Hello, I'm here. Cecily, you said it right the first time, Cecily.

Oh good.

Hi, Dr. Dyer, it's such an honor to talk to you. Thank you. I follow you on Twitter. And reading your books and just coming to know myself. And I do have a question. I have planted seeds of fruitfulness and I'm starting to see them blossom and bloom. I've gotten several voiceover requests today and things of that nature. I do, however, have an issue with dealing with circumstances that kind of throw you back. Like, I got a circumstance today, even though I've sown these seeds of fruitfulness in my business, I had some other instance where I was just kind of set set back a little bit, and it seems to happen on a regular basis. But I pray to God, and I talk to the angels, and I'll read something that you'll say, or I'll read a quote, and I'm inspired, and I kind of move on. I guess my question is, when you have this state of allowance, and yet you deal with circumstances on a regular basis— it seems to happen now on a regular basis— is that a shift that's starting to take place, and you're starting to allow more? Or what exactly is happening when you begin to see or notice certain things that kind of press you back or pull you back, and you're still trying to allow certain things to happen. What's going on in life?

Yeah, we could talk a lot about that. I mean, there's— I remember when I was giving up drinking years ago, when I gave up doing drugs and things like that years ago, that every time I would get a week or two under my belt, I would get this sort of temptation. I'd get that I can't get pulled back. I'd get called back. And it would be right there in front of me and so on. And I've always used this metaphor. When I was in high school in Detroit, I was on the track team and I was the high jumper on the track team. And I used to, you know, in order to get myself, propel myself over the bar, you have to run up to the bar as fast as you can and get down as low as you can. And then the coach would always say, get down low, get down low, because the lower you get, the lower you get, the more you fall when you have a fall. The higher you will be able to propel yourself. And it's like these falls that take place in our life, these things that we call obstacles or difficulties or struggles, or, you know, things that are interfering with what it is that we want in our life. They, you know, virtually every spiritual advance that you're going to ever make in your life is going to be preceded by a fall or a series of falls of one kind or another. The question isn't whether or not, you know, these falls are going to come up in your life. Like right now, a lot of people know because it was on ABC World News that I have leukemia. And it's like, man, people have been saying to me, well, doesn't that prove that the things that you say, you know, don't work? How could someone like you get leukemia when you've been talking about being positive all your life? I remember saying to the interviewer, Dan Harris, I said to him, uh, you know, I didn't say— they didn't put this on the air, by the way, they cut it out— I said, I didn't say that if you think positive and you have an uplifting attitude and so on, that the things aren't going to happen in your life, that your body isn't going to wear out. Everything that materializes dematerializes, including our bodies and so on. The question isn't whether or not they, uh, you know, these things are going to happen. The question is, what are you going to do? How do you handle them when they do show up? Can you be in a state of gratitude for the things? You know, that there's, uh, there's someone in my life that I'm not seeing right now that I miss very much. Does that mean that, you know, that this is some horrible thing that is coming in my life? Or is this an opportunity for me to go within and to examine all of the things that are going on in my life and to be in a state of gratitude for the absence, or for the funding that isn't showing up, or for the illness that isn't. And for me, I'm in a total state of gratitude. I always remember my friend Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. Uh, you— I'm sure you've heard about her. She, you know, she was a triplet, and she wrote all this stuff on death and dying and so on. And she said, when you shield the mountain from the windstorms, you'll never see the beauty of the carvings. You know, the storms of our life are what give us the beauty of the carvings, the things that we do in our life. The 10 years I spent in a series of foster homes and orphanages with my brother Dave, which I was just talking to Connie about before, allowed me to learn self-reliance and allowed me to be able to, uh, going to my father's grave in 1974 with this man I had never seen before and being able to forgive him after all of the, uh, for walking out on us and abusing us and being an alcoholic and and all the horrible things that he did to my mother and so on. You know, that act of forgiveness probably turned my entire life around. Every negative thing that comes into our life that we, you know, instead of saying, why is this happening? Is this wrong? Be in a state of gratitude for it because, because it will make you stronger. It will make you stronger. You know, you don't want to try to avoid the rainstorms or the horrible storms of your life. What you want to do is learn how to dance in the You know, how to sing in the rain, how to be able to be in a state of joy and fulfillment even when the things that you think shouldn't be happening are happening for you. Because everything that shows up in your life, you absolutely have to have in order to move on to the next step.

Okay. All right.

I'll take that. Does it make sense? Yeah.

It makes perfect sense. Just stay in that state of gratitude despite everything.

Just stay in a state of gratitude and say to yourself, instead Instead of saying— see, I say there's 3 ways to get to enlightenment. One is called enlightenment through suffering, which means that something happens for me and I go through years and years and years of suffering, and then I look back and I say, oh, now I know why I had to go through that. That's the first. That's a horrible way though, because it might take 10 years and you don't have too many 10-year periods. The second one is when something negative is happening to you that you don't understand or don't like or feels like it's an interference. Say to yourself, what's in it for me right now? What is there in it, this experience that I'm having right now, that is going to help me to grow and propel myself? And the third way, this is the significant way, is when things start coming at you that used to bring you down, you get out in front of it and you can dodge it. You can avoid it completely by being in a state of gratitude for it and not being terrified of it and not being afraid of it. Getting rid of the fear, letting it go. And just saying, okay, if you're going to show up in my life, this is exactly how I'm going to handle it. I'm not afraid whatsoever. And off you go.

Okay.

Okay.

I can do that. Thank you so much.

Namaste.

Very well said. I always learn more from situations I hate than situations I love.

Absolutely.

And let's go to some more calls while we have one more segment here. And this sounds interesting. I'm curious to see what he has to say. Milo in Monterey, California on line 1. And thanks for being patient. You're on with Dr. Wayne Dyer.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi.

Mr. Dyer, I'd like to applaud you on your work and your literature, first and foremost. Thank you. I've been a prison guard at a maximum security prison for a couple of years, and I've been quite disenchanted in that I've found that it's nothing like I thought it was going to be, from top to the bottom of the job, and financially rewarding and such. I'm about a month shy of my 36th birthday, and I see that I, I, it probably wouldn't be healthy for me to continue in this line of work. I feel like the energy is really heavy there, and, and there's really no movement toward progression.

You understand what I'm saying?

I do.

And I can't be in that environment and be content.

Well, as much as I probably shouldn't be saying I can't, um, It's just real heavy, and I'm a really— I feel things really in depth, so I feel the heaviness, you know. So I ultimately, I guess what I wanted to ask was, is there some way I can— I'd like to really broaden my career horizon and maybe get into another line of work. What would be a constructive avenue to manifest opportunities? Or, you know, I overheard another caller saying something and you guys replied with that state of allowing.

I believe I have some serious blockage to my ability to allow things in my life that I would like to attract. I think that's been something that has plagued me since adolescence as far as believing in myself and believing in manifesting what you'd like to create in your life. I think that—

Okay, Milo, let me respond because we always have such time limitations.

Of course.

You're a prison guard in a maximum security prison.

Yes, sir.

You're in the business of revenge. You know that basically it's, um, you know, it's punishment. It's— it isn't just a system which is designed to keep people who are too dangerous to live in society separate from the rest of us. It's a system that is designed to be punitive, to be cruel, in many cases to be just as ugly towards those people as they were to their victims.

You know what I'm saying?

Absolutely. And that energy actually permeates into the officers too. I mean, a lot of officers act like inmates.

Absolutely.

And I see that and I don't want it to change me into that.

Right. And so it's— and that goes from almost everybody in that system, from the wardens all the way down to the people who work in the cafeterias and so on.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So you're in a system, a system which is, you know, really bringing you down. And for me, my first reaction as you started talking, before you even hardly told me what you were, is instead of being in that place where you are acting in the same ways that the people that are being confined towards them, why not make the shift, Milo? Why not shift to getting yourself to a place working with people to avoid them ever having to get in that place in the first place. In other words, working with the disenchanted youth, working with disadvantaged youth, working with drug, uh, you know, uh, places. Get yourself a degree in something or the training that you need so that you can— and every single time you reach one of those young teenagers or one of those young people in their 20s or whatever it is, or even preteens, and you spend a few hours with them or you spend a week or you become committed with them and you say this is one less person that is going to be in that position. That's one thing. If you can't do that— yeah, if you can't do that, in other words, if you can't start your training so that your mission is to keep people from ever having to get to one of those places, and you decide you have to stay because of the benefits or because of whatever it is, then, then you have to become an instrument of love in a place which is filled with hatred and revenge. In other words, you cannot allow— you know, they said of Jesus, you know, that when he would enter a village, just his presence in the village and nothing more would elevate the consciousness of those around him. When he was on Golgotha and he was being crucified, there was a thief to his right and a thief to his left, right? And they became converted when he talked with criminals, with the robbers and the prostitutes and so on. They would want to become better just by being in his presence. Patanjali said that when you are steadfast in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed towards yourself and others, that all living creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence. Go to that place. I sense within you a deep and profound love and caring for all people. So get yourself to a place where you can now work with people to have them avoid that, or if not, In the prison itself where you are the guard, become someone in there who is going to reach these people and help them to overcome.

I've had inmates tell me I don't belong there because I don't treat people a certain way. They're like, dude, you don't belong here.

You're a real nice guy. Not weak and fearful, right? But really genuine and respectful, you know what I mean?

Right.

I don't treat them like they're beneath me. So I've had inmates tell me, dude, you need to find another line of work.

You're a good guy. You shouldn't be here. This is a bad place.

And I'm like, well, I don't know about that. I'm not sure. I don't either, because I think in bad places that we need the kind of consciousness that you bring to the work that you do. And you can probably— if you can't, as I said, I see you doing something to help people to overcome these things. Most of these inmates that are in there are, you know, they're victims themselves. They came from— they come from horrible, horrible places. They were abandoned when they were young. They were drug— their parents were drug addicts. They walked— they were walked out on. They were beaten up. They were, you know, and very much like these soldiers that are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and we're turning them into killers when they come home, and they become killers at home. It's important for your level of consciousness, wherever you are, don't tell yourself it's the wrong place for you to be. Remind yourself that who you are is this divine spirit. You are a piece of God. And you can do that in the most horrific places and not be weak and help to convert people. Stay in that consciousness and begin to get yourself some training. I would become a drug counselor if I were you. That's— I don't know why that just comes up. Just someone who helps, because almost all of those people are there because of some kind of affiliation with alcohol and drugs, substance abuse.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, become that. Become an addictionologist or someone like that. Gotta go, Milo, my friend. God bless you.

God bless you.

Thank you.

God bless you, Milo. Namaste.

And while we have time, let's go to Meg in Australia, Adelaide, Australia, line 9. And thanks for holding, Meg.

Hi.

Thanks so much for taking my call. This is such a thrill for me, and I know we're running out of time. I just had a question about— I've just finished reading Excuses Be Gone, and I'm interested in your thoughts about when my— the excuse I seem to bring up for myself a lot is I don't need to change. I'm perfect the way I am. God is fine with me the way I am, even though I know that there are changes I need to make. Um, I just wondered what your thoughts were.

Yeah, what, uh, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't think there's— I don't think that's necessarily a bad excuse. It's not one of the ones I put in the book, that, uh, the idea that you need to change, or the idea that there's something wrong with you, or there's some imperfection there. I think we all have a, you know, we all have within us a, you know, we must be like what we came from. Our basic original nature is one of kindness, it's one of love, it's one of sharing, it's one of giving. Changing behaviors isn't the same as changing ourselves, you know. I just think that the closer you get to what Einstein said, when it, you know, that the most important thing that we can learn to do is to think like God thinks, you know. If you can just allow yourself to think like that and recognize Hey, I'm fine. I'm fine as a human being. I'm a good human being. There are things that I would like to change about how I behave this way and that way, and those will all come. They will all come with time. Just be patient about that and don't have so many strong expectations that you have to constantly be improving. You have to constantly be growing. You have to constantly be better and better and better. All of that is the energy of futurizing, thinking about this is where I should be. I should be here. I should be there. I should be someplace else. There's something to be said very strongly. There's something to be said for being content and being happy with yourself and saying, hey, where I am is absolutely perfect. It's absolutely perfect. And if the changes are going to come— a good analogy for this, Meg, is the sky. Look at the sky when you get off this phone call, if it's still light in Australia.

Yeah. Oh no, it's morning here. It's gorgeous.

Oh, that's right.

I've—

no, I've been watching the Australian Open here.

Oh yeah.

Every night. Yeah.

And it's basically a hot— no, National holiday here. It's Australia Day.

I know it's Australia Day today. I know that I'm coming down to Australia, by the way, in, uh, in Perth and Sydney in, uh, in August. Uh, I can do it down there. But when you go out and look at the sky, and you look at the sky and you say, uh, is it perfect? You say, well, it's got clouds over here, it's got close up, but is it perfect? You say, well, it's the only sky we have, it has to be perfect. Of course it's perfect. Now you say to yourself, Can it change? And the answer is, of course. Now you look at it an hour later and it's different than it was an hour before, but it's still perfect. You can change and still be perfect. You can constantly be in that state of where I am is absolutely fine. It's going to change. Of course it's going to change. I'm, you know, I'm going to change as a human being as well. But that perfection is that understanding that I am connected to something that is changeless, that never changes. Changes, because you have been in— how old are you now?

Um, 36.

So you're 36 years old. So you've been in, uh, in a whole lot of different bodies already, haven't you? I mean, you were in a tiny little body, you were in an 8-year-old body, you were in a 20-year-old body, you were in a 27-year-old body. And that body, you wouldn't— if you looked at that body now when you were 4 years old, for example, you wouldn't even recognize you. And yet the you who you are continues to go into new bodies and new bodies constantly. The part that doesn't change is who you are. That's your essence. That's your highest self. And it's just constantly going into different beings. Be in that state of contentment. Okay?

Yeah.

God bless you.

Thank you so much.

Okay. And can anybody beat Federer down there? My goodness.

I don't know. He's doing pretty well. I enjoyed the game last night even though he beat our boy.

But he beat Hewitt and then your girl lost too. Stosur. She lost to Serena Williams.

I like the Wizard of Oz, though. I sort of hope they win.

Yeah, that's so nice.

Thank you so much for taking my call.

You're very welcome. Namaste.

I'm so happy to say Dr. Wayne Dyer is here in the studio with me live for the second week in a row.

You look so beautiful.

So exciting. Thank you. It's nice to see your face here in person. So I'm excited about the show today. The phone lines are just opening up here. So if you'd like to get in touch with Dr. Dyer, we had some people contact me via email in New Zealand. They're very excited to see you because it's been quite a number of years since you've been over there. Yes, it has.

I was there 20-some years ago with Marianne Williamson and John Gray and myself and one of my daughters. Yeah, we had a wonderful time.

It's going to be amazing to visit them again.

I love the Kiwis.

Yeah.

Great.

I love the Kiwis.

The Kiwis. Now, is that the bird? It's a Kiwi bird, right?

It is. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's a bird that doesn't fly. I'm not sure about that, but I—

Yeah.

Well, they're very excited.

Yeah.

So I know—

And I fly tonight, by the way. I mean, in a few hours I'm getting on a plane and we got a 14-hour flight tonight.

That's a long flight.

Brutal.

But you don't eat that airplane food, right?

I do, but I just kind of pick at it. A lot of the stuff I don't.

We're lucky we get food, right?

I've changed my diet around completely in the last last 6 months or so. I'm doing, you know, really cleansing and working at something called Radical Well-Being, trying to get myself in the absolute best shape internally, physically, and emotionally, and spiritually. So I'm on a program myself, and I drink like 64 ounces a day of fresh-squeezed juices, vegetable juices, and so on. I do green smoothies. I cut out sugar completely from my diet. Wow.

Now, do you keep a vegan lifestyle or vegetarian?

No, it's nothing like that. I try to keep the toxins out, the poisons out. I don't eat red meat. Occasionally I'll eat some chicken, mostly vegetables and so on. But it's the juicing and it's being wheat-free and gluten-free and also being sugar-free and doing my coffee enemas. I gotta do my coffee enemas every day. Yes, that's it. Yes, Star Butts, that's my new group. And exercising and doing a lot of very deep meditation and really working very hard. I'm staying out here in La Costa for a week and I was with Deepak Chopra on Friday night. We had a little conversation together and he introduced me to someone named Rupert Spira who has written a book called— about the transcendence of things, the transparency of things. Rather, and I've been listening to some of his work. He's from England. And just, it's amazing because at age 75 I have more energy and more excitement and more learning taking place now. I've read some of the really deep Far Eastern, Middle Eastern spiritual texts, been reading a lot of poetry, and I think what I'm in, I'm in a state of preparation for writing something about, because these seminars that I'm doing are called I Am Light. And it's about finding that light within ourselves and recognizing our own infinite nature. And that's been an exciting time for me. And the other day, maybe a couple of weeks ago, I was watching Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. I don't know if you ever watch Jimmy.

He's hilarious.

He's more than hilarious. He's so immensely talented. He's one of the few people can actually— I don't think there's ever a show that I don't really smile a lot and laugh out loud at some of the antics. And watching his ability to do impersonations. He does just about anybody, and dancing, and singing, and acting, and, you know, and so— Anyway, he came on, and he had a very bad accident at home. He fell, and he was wearing a wedding ring on his left hand, and that ring caught on— as he fell, it caught on the edge of a table and almost tore his finger off. I mean, his finger was— instead of pointing straight up, was pointing directly to the left. He looked at his finger and it's like it had almost broken off. And so they rushed him to the hospital and he had to go to a very special place because there's only a few specialists in the world who do this kind of work, this microsurgery, where they have to take every single little stitch and it has to be done, you know, with this real great precision. And he happened to get the guy who does this and they put— he was in intensive care for 5 days and now he's got this bandage on his finger and it's healing and eventually his finger is going to be saved. It's going to take almost a year.

What a crazy accident, just a random thing like that.

Crazy accident, absolutely, yeah. And he almost lost his finger and the doctor who did it said that most people do lose their finger when they have this, so get those wedding rings off.

I know, I'm looking down, I better take this off.

So, and then he came back a few weeks or maybe a month ago now and he started explaining what had happened with the accident and that he was in surgery and that he was, you know, tied up in intensive care for 5 days. And he showed a book that he read, one of the books that he read, and the book is called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Now, this is a book that I required all of my students to read when I was teaching both in high school and when I taught it in college and when I also taught in graduate school. It was required reading. Everybody knew that if they took a course from from Dr. Dyer, they would have to read Man's Search for Meaning. It was written by a man named Viktor Frankl, who in 1942, when I was 2 years old, was taken out of his home in Vienna, and along with his wife, who was pregnant at the time, he was in his 20s, he was a psychiatrist, and they took everything away from him. He was Jewish, and he was put in— he was sent to Auschwitz, and he was in Auschwitz for 3 years, and then he went to Dachau in Bavaria near Munich. These are places that I have been to. I've really looked at that because it's just— man's inhumanity to man has always been one of my greatest mysteries. You know, how can we possibly, when we come from such a place of divine love, turn our thoughts and our awareness into so much hatred and wanting to destroy each other and killing each other and judging each other and putting people into compartments and putting people into ovens and, you You know, this took place in my life. I mean, you'd think it was the Middle Ages, what was taking place, you know, when millions and millions of people were just being exterminated every day just because of their belief, because of their religion, or anything else. So he was placed into a concentration camp in Poland, and of every 28 people who went into Auschwitz, 1 would survive. So 27— your odds were 1 in 28 that you would come out of there alive. And he was one of the ones that did, and he talks about why he did. He was liberated in 1945 when I was 5 years of age. Again, it's still impossible for me to even conceive that this was all taking place—

Still in our lifetime.

—when I was a little boy living in an orphanage in Michigan, that people were being gassed to death and so on. That's just— I still can't even comprehend that kind of thing. I have difficulty even with people having road rage or yelling at other people. People. I mean, I, I'd like to consider myself a being of love and have no judgment towards anyone. So in 1978, I had written several best-selling books: Your Erroneous Zones, Pulling Your Own Strings. And because of that, I was invited to Vienna by YPO, the Young Presidents Organization, and I was placed on a panel with two other people. Virginia Satir— I've talked about this on this show before— who's a very prominent conjoint family therapist this brilliant woman, and then also Viktor Frankl. And so the three of us made a presentation, and I was in such awe. By this time, I had been teaching at the university for 7 years, and I had also been out of teaching and writing books and lecturing and appearing on The Tonight Show all the time with Johnny Carson and so on. It was just a regular part of my life, and because of the popularity of my books, and they had been translated translated into so many languages, including German, which he spoke. The title of Your Erroneous Zones in German is called Der Wunderpunkt, which means Your Wondrous Points. So, when I was told that I was going to be on a panel with Viktor Frankl, I almost collapsed. I mean, I was just so thrilled and humble at the idea. This, to me, was one of the great great men of the 20th century. And there I was, you know, considered an equal with him, which I didn't think of myself at all. And so I had read Man's Search for Meaning way back there in the '60s and '70s, and I hadn't read it since. That's like now 35, 40 years.

And how old was he at this time? Viktor Frankl?

He was born in 1905. So 1978, he was 73. He died in 1997. At the age of 92. And he was lecturing all over the world and just one of the sweetest, kindest, most beautiful men that I'd ever encountered. We went to lunch after my presentation and I was stammering through my presentation because I just couldn't believe that Viktor Frankl had—

You were there talking to him?

Well, he had actually read my book in German and was talking about it. I was just like, you know, I was just so I was just so honored. And so, after the presentation, we went to lunch together, and I remember him saying to me, he said, "When we are confronted with a situation over which we have no control," he said, "we are challenged to change ourselves." And he said, "The problem is that most people cannot change theirself because they're so caught up in their beliefs about what is real and what isn't real and what is true and what isn't true." my perceptions of reality. And he gave an example in the talk. He said that we were given a bowl of dirty water and a floating dead fish head floating in it. He said that was our protein for the day. And he said we were challenged to not only not judge that and not only not be angry about it, but to find beauty in it. To be able to find beauty, to be able to see beauty everywhere, even in the suffering that was taking taking place, and the immense amount of suffering that took place, the people, the beatings that he took, the frostbitten feet that he, you know, had to work out from early morning until night. He was a prisoner who was put on work details. He was a medical doctor. And his— he didn't know it at the time, but his entire family, except for one sister who emigrated to Australia, all of them, his wife, she was the first day that she was taken. She was gassed to death, his mother and his father. And the only reason that he stayed in Vienna, because he knew what was coming, was because of his elderly parents. He just said that he had to stay there and be with them, even though they had asked him to leave. He said he couldn't. And the kinds of things that he did and so on. And so when Jimmy Fallon held up this book, which I'm holding in my hand right now, I thought, you know what, I've got to reread that. It really touched me in such a deep way. And so I bought it and read it on the plane, and this past week I studied it again. And there's one sentence in there, one little part of the paragraph that I wanted to just share with you, because so many people talk on the show, talk about their suffering. Now, the kind of suffering, it's hard to even imagine the kind of suffering. Imagine your home, you're in your home today, and you get there, and there's a bunch of Gestapo and Nazis there, and they just—

with guns and pulling you out of your house.

And they just take take you away and everything that you ever owned or that you ever— is just gone, is given, you know, taken away and, you know, is given to somebody else. And you're put on a train with thousands of other people and on this train you would be sent away to a concentration camp and, you know, at the sign at the door or at the gate of Auschwitz said, "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." You know, it's like there's no hope for you, you know, you are a prisoner, you are the lowest form of humanity, you will die here. And you will be put to work until you can't walk anymore, and then you will die. And he took notes on this throughout his entire time. So when we talk about suffering, you know, it's— and for him to do this for 3 years in bitter cold until he was finally liberated, and he was a skeleton when he was liberated, and so were so many others. And this is what it says, this one little sentence, he said, if there is If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete. And he makes the case in this book, in Man's Search for Meaning, that any suffering that we go through, whatever it might be—emotional suffering, physical suffering, suffering, pain of illnesses, the pain of loss, you know, relationships that break up and so on, that it's an opportunity. He said there's basically 3 ways to find meaning in life. One is through your work, for whatever it is that you come here to do, and you can feel meaning. Another is in love, in relationships and so on. You can find meaning in being able to love as God loves us, because we come from love. And he said the third way is in suffering. And I think back of the— in my own lifetime, of the, uh, any suffering that I've done in my life which is in the overcoming of having to live in an orphanage and having been abandoned as a child, the struggle of overcoming addictions earlier in my life, the struggle or the suffering involved in a breakup when my wife and I separated 16 years ago. And out of every single one of them, as I began to examine my own life, out of every single one of them, I found very powerful meaning. It was in I think 2001 or so that I was in just a deep state of sadness and almost depression. And it was out of that state of when my wife and I separated and all that. And my wife and I are very close to this day. We're not living together, but we're very close. She's going on the cruise with us when we go to Israel. And we speak almost every day. And we love each other very much. But at that time, I was forced to look at myself and to see out of this suffering, what meaning can I find in this? Suffering. And that's when I wrote The Power of Intention, which is— some people think of it as— I went back and reread The Power of Intention when I was writing I Can See Clearly Now, when I looked through the different phases and what was going on. I just couldn't believe how good it was. I couldn't believe that I could have written that, that I could have put that kind of energy and time and that I found all of that information.

But you couldn't have had you not gone through what you went through. I couldn't have.

Because when you get into suffering, one of the things Viktor Frankl talks about is compassion and how suffering brings you to a state of compassion. He says not for everyone. He said everyone reacts a little bit different to the suffering. So that some people in the suffering became— the lowest form of who they were would come out and they would steal somebody else's bread. And there were other people who would find meaning and share their bread with someone, who would give their shoes away. To someone who had frostbitten feet and so on. So that, you know, for some people suffering meant one thing and for some others it just meant giving up and not finding it. And he quotes Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky says, he said, "I always had to ask the question, 'Am I worthy of my suffering? Am I worthy of it?'" And I think I asked myself that very same question in my life when I was going through some of the things that are so minor compared to what some people have had to put up with in their life, like Dr. Frankl. And then on page 153, I said, I've got to read this on my radio show. Whenever I do this, I want to share these things with my readers, because I wrote next to it in the margin—

it says, wow, it says wow on the page.

And this is what I want to share with you, and then we'll open up the phones. Sigmund Freud once asserted, let one attempt to expose a expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger, which— and hunger is such a part of this book, you know, being without food, because they would just get a gram or two of food and they had to, you know, oftentimes just scrounge around for just a few crumbs and so on. Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger, with the increase of the imperative urge of hunger, all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unsettled urge. So that's Freud's idea, that all individual differences will melt away when we're confronted with a basic need of hunger. It's like, and we'll all just, you know, be consumed with our need for that. And Viktor Frankl says, thank heaven Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur, but on the contrary, people became more different. People unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. And today, you need no longer hesitate to use the word saints. Think of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz, and who in 1983 was canonized. That just because you're faced with the most horrible conditions that a human being can be faced with, you can become worthy of your suffering. And some people did, and, you know, even went into the gas chambers with a prayer on their lips, finding meaning meaning even in that kind of thing. So, as you think about your calls to me and about your life and about the suffering that you experience, ask yourself the question that Fyodor Dostoevsky asked himself: Am I worthy of my suffering? Is this one of the opportunities for me to find meaning in my life? And it doesn't have to be something where I just give up on myself. And become what he called "swine." You can become a saint as well in the midst of your suffering. And I like to think that the suffering that I've experienced in my own life, the separations, the anxieties, the stress, the, you know, the fears, have really helped me to become a better person, to find more meaning in my life. And some of the best things I've done, some of the best talks I've ever given, were when I was suffering inside and struggling and was able to just develop a kind of compassion for others.

And pull something beautiful out of that. Such an amazing lesson and such a strong message. So I just urge you all—

I used to tell my students, and I often say in my lectures, Man's Search for Meaning— and this book's got some additional essays in the back, but You can read the book in about 2 hours. It's really not that long. And it was written shortly after he was liberated. It's hard for you not to ask yourself the question, "How would I have done? How would I have done? Would I have survived that?" I wonder.

I don't know. I like to think I'm good in a crisis. Yeah. But, again, presented with something like that that is really unimaginable, I wonder how I do. But I think it's interesting what you said, too, about how the true nature would come out where some people people would be more compassionate and as a result be more resilient than the ones that—

Well, I think of Gandhi, you know, and I think of Martin Luther King that, you know, despite the beatings, despite the starvation, despite, you know, all of the things that were being done, they found, you know, I mean, Gandhi found a way to rally his people to overcome the entire British Empire. Martin Luther King, I mean, if you've seen Selma, have you Have you seen the film Selma? It's a very powerful movie. Yeah. I was almost there. I was on my way to go down there, you know, 50 years ago when that took place. But I didn't. But I was doing a lot of other things. But he still found a way to find meaning, to use nonviolence rather than to take on the same kind of actions and repay the violence that was being visited on them in the same way that we We have to be better than that. Think of Jesus, you know, on the cross, you know, being tortured, and a soldier throws a spear into him and his response is, "Forgive them, Father, for they don't know what they do." I think he meant, "They don't know that when they throw a spear into me, they're throwing a spear into all of humanity, because we're all one." Right. Think about your own sufferings as you ask your questions.

Well, I've got nothing to complain about at this point.

Yes, exactly. Anyway, I wanted to share that. I'm glad I did.

No, I'm so glad you did. It's such an amazing book. So let's grab some calls while we still have some time on the show. And since you are going to Australia, let's start in Melbourne.

Oh good, I'm coming there next week.

And here's Kathy on line 2.

Hi Kathy! Hello, how are you?

I'm great, thanks. How are you, my dear?

I'm fantastic, I'm fantastic. This is so exciting.

I can't believe I'm So what's going on down there in Melbourne? It's August and they tell me it's winter. I think you guys got things mixed up. Are you in the wrong hemisphere or am I doing something wrong?

You know what, I'm actually from Canada originally, but I married my husband and I have two small children, so now I'm in Australia. So it's not like Canadian winter, but it's still cool. Yeah. Definitely wear a sweater.

Oh, I've been there many times. I love Melbourne. That was another place you talk about suffering. The last time I spoke in Melbourne, about 3 years ago, I collapsed on stage. I had never ever had an experience like that. My neck was just— something went off in my neck. I've healed that now, but at that time I was in a very bad way. But I also went back out on stage about an hour later and was able to finish it. Yeah, so what's on your mind today, my dear?

Well, you know, it's so funny.

I had something on my mind, and now after listening to your talk, I thought to myself, nobody's ever going to call the show again because, you know, you can't— have you— do you know about Viktor Frankl? Have you read Man's Search for Meaning?

I haven't, but now I have it written down. I've heard you speak about him before, and I definitely want to read that book now. It's pretty incredible, and it does make my first-world small problems seem pretty small given the magnitude of the life and the experience that he's had. And, you know, and a lot of the other people that you've mentioned as you've been talking. And, you know, just before your show came on, I was on Facebook and I saw this clip of a little boy in Savannah, Georgia. And when he was, I think, 4 years old, he lost his father. And then a year later, he lost his mother. And, um, And so at one point he realized that— he noticed that people weren't smiling around him. And so he said to his carer, who's his aunt, he said, "I just want to bring the smiles back to everyone." And so he— that's when it started. And then he goes onto the streets of Savannah and he gives people who aren't smiling toys. So that he, even though he's in his, you know, his young life, he has endured immense suffering, I can imagine, he still has this light inside of him that he's so clear about, and he just wants to bring joy to people.

It's so beautiful. Oh my goodness. You know, I was also in Australia the day that Mother Teresa died. It was way back, I think 2001, if I'm not mistaken, right in that area. And she often said that, you know, every day, she said, every day, I see Jesus Christ in all of his distressing disguises. In other words, you know, whatever poverty that she would encounter, whatever suffering that she would see going on in people, she would see God, she would see the Christ in each and every one of them. And that's what allowed her to live the kind of life that she lived. And I remember I was speaking in Darling Harbour in Sydney that morning, and I was going on, it was about 9 o'clock in the morning, And 5 minutes before I went to speak, someone came up and told me that Mother Teresa had passed. And I had been honored to be in the presence of Mother Teresa in an interview in Phoenix, Arizona back in the 1980s. And I said to the audience that I just announced that Mother Teresa had just passed, and I said, "Isn't it just like her?" I said, "She left when the whole world's attention was on the funeral of Princess Diana." And I said, "Wouldn't it be just like her to, with no ego whatsoever, to say, 'I'm just going to sort of sneak out now so that nobody even notices,' and to put all of the attention on what was taking place in the day of her funeral?" Yeah.

Yeah. That's interesting. That was actually 1997. Was it? '97? And the only reason I know that is because I moved to London 3 weeks after that she died. And I remember looking at Kensington Palace, and even though it was 3 weeks later, the flowers were still— right, you could see them for miles. And I just remember thinking as I sat there, some, some people had actually brought pictures of Mother Teresa as well to put in with flowers. I thought, oh, that's just— that's beautiful. At least there's a recognition that Someone else really amazing has left our world too.

Right. Yeah.

Well, what were you calling for, even though it may seem trivial at this point? But tell me what motivated you to pick up the phone today. You're such a lovely lady. Are you going to be there in Melbourne? I'm speaking with Anita Moorjani the 22nd, I think it's the 22nd and 23rd, Saturday and Sunday.

Yeah. So at this point, money is very tight. But I'm not counting it out yet. I am going to reassess it in the week before you get, which is next week.

So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to— you're going to come as my guest. Okay. You know, you're going to come as my guest. You leave your name, you come to the door that day and you ask for either Maya or Leon and you tell them that I invited you to be on the show and I invited you to come to the seminar. As my guest, just because you picked up the phone today. So money is no longer an issue. Now you have no excuses. Yeah, you come in and ask for Maya Leibos. She works for me, and she'll know, because I'll tell her on the plane tonight that we're heading to Brisbane tonight, and then the following Saturday and Sunday I'll be there. And you can bring a guest as well. So you— so if you'd like to bring your husband—

my husband will be working, and— or he'll have to take care of our children. Oh, I do have another I love to go, but I have to repay you in some way. And I, I took the Writers Workshop via livestream. Oh, did you? Yeah, I did. From Maui? Maui, yeah. Well, I wasn't there, I was watching the livestream. I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning, so I was there with you in spirit. But I noticed you really like to have a green smoothie, so if I could make you a Hawaiian green smoothie for the be— that would really make my, my whole weekend. You bring me a green smoothie.

It's, uh, Kathy, right, from Melbourne?

And we'll, we'll get your information, Kathy, so don't hang up, okay? Yeah.

And we'll, we'll see that you have a place right in the front row right there with me.

All right, God bless you. We're kind of losing our connection there, but thanks for your call. We'll hook her up. We got connections for this.

We got— that's right, absolutely. I'll tell Leon. If you won't let her in, I'm not coming.

So let's go after that one to Zephyr Hills, Florida, and Amanda, and she is on line 1.

Thanks for calling in, Amanda. Hi, I can't believe this. I just put it right into my imagination, and just like Dr. Dyer always says, since the second I heard your voice, Dr. Dyer, it's been a dream of mine to speak to you. Just an absolute dream. I'm almost in tears right now. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah, thank you so much. You've gotten me through some very strenuous times in my life, and I humbly appreciate you. You are truly, truly not of this earth, sir.

None of us are. That's right, that's right.

So anyway, um, that's so strange because Mother Teresa's "If you can't feed 100 people, feed just one" is on the back of my business card. Right now. I work for a foundation that feeds hungry children in the community. And my question is, we're just a little foundation. We started about 150 bags a week. We feed kids on the weekends when they don't have their school food. There's a high volume of food insecurity in our area. So we started about 150 bags a week and we're to well over 1,000 now of kids in our area that we pack the bags and take them to the school so the kids have something to eat. Eat, you know, when they go home. And I just— my question to you is, is how do you handle when people that you love very much and are close in your life with you maybe don't feel like— you don't feel like you're on the same path? Not that they aren't supporting you, but you super want them to be excited with you. Like, I, I put this into my consciousness that I said, God, please put me somewhere my love matters. Because that's too much love. And, you know, so not that they maybe don't support and think you're on a good path, but you want them to just bandwagon along with you, and that doesn't necessarily happen. No, it doesn't.

It hardly ever does. You know, basically, here's what you're saying, Amanda: if only you were more like me, then I wouldn't have to be so upset with you right now.

Yes.

I do the same thing. I mean, two of my daughters are coming with me to Australia, Skye and Sage, and they'll both actually be on the program. I'm gonna have Skye sing and Sage is gonna talk about her book. And I gave them each $1,000 yesterday in cash to come, you know, for spending money for the next— they're gonna be with me for the next 2 and a half weeks. And both of them, I mean, I adore these kids, okay? Obviously every one of them. And they took the money and they put it in their wallet and then they were just continuing on with the conversation. I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "You were just given $1,000. $1,000. I expect jumping up and down. I expect you to be, you know, I can't contain myself in the excitement. It just, the windows just opened and the wind just blew $1,000 into my hand. Where's the excitement?" "Oh, Dad, well, you know, we're excited, we're happy, but—" And basically it reminds me of what your question is. If only you were more like me is what I'm saying. You know, because if that was my mother, when my mother was alive, and I would give my mother, you know, $1,000 for this or to buy her a nice piece of jewelry, oh my God, she would jump up and down. She would just say, "Oh, you can't believe it." She'd call everybody that she knew. She couldn't, you know. And you know what? Everybody's unique. Everybody has their own way. And some people are quiet. I mean, I love— there's a woman that I love very, very, very much in my life. And she doesn't go around saying all the kinds of things that I do. She's not like poetic and modern like I am and all of these kind of things. She just like, you know, has a different way of doing it. She always reminds me, "Just because I'm not like you and just because I don't do it doesn't mean I don't feel it inside the same way." So what I would suggest is that you, you know, keep your attention on just the love. And they say the greatest way of expressing the God within you is to do something for somebody else with no expectation of even a thank you. You know, it's like that poem I always quote from Hafiz, you know, "Even after all this time," Hafiz said, "the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.'" Just think what a love like that can do. It lights up the whole world, you know.

That's right.

And I'm listening to "Mastery of Love" right now with the book on tape, and I think it is just just brilliant, you know, their thought. You know, I just think that was shared, um, by a friend to me. And, you know, it's just stuff that's just manifested into my life so in perfect timing that, you know, it is amazing. It is, you know, what the Lord planned for you. And sometimes it makes you feel like, am I on the right path by being around people that don't feel the same way as me? But maybe that is part of my path.

That is your path, dear. That is your path. And that's what you have to get it doesn't matter how they react. You don't— I often say, you know, when you see someone standing on the side of the road with a piece of brown paper written on a bag, "I'm homeless," you don't have to give them money. You can give a silent blessing. But the thing that you don't have to do is give a judgment and say, "Oh, they should be out working," or they should be doing any of those things. They are where they are. And how you treat people is your karma. How you treat people is your karma. Your karma, okay? And how people react is theirs. So it's your reaction, or how people treat you, that's their karma. But how you react, that's yours. And let go of any judgment that you have about how the world ought to be. It's just exactly the way it's supposed to be, and the people are behaving and reacting exactly as they know how to do. There's no higher calling than that. There's no higher calling.

And you really do start to feel, as your vibrations heighten, you know, that the And certain people that I'm speaking of, I see it heightening too, but it's just, "Come along with me, be right where I am," just like you said, and that's not it. Right.

And sometimes you don't even— you know, I remember years ago when I was working on my doctorate and I was doing an apprenticeship and doing some group therapy and so on, and I would notice that, you know, that somebody wouldn't speak for the entire time, they wouldn't— or sometimes in speaking before an audience I will look at the audience out there and I'll see someone who looks like they're either asleep or that they're not interested and so on, and I'll think to myself, you know, why am I paying so much attention to this? And then when the talk is over, very often that person or the person in the group that I was talking about when I was doing an apprenticeship as a doctoral student, I would say to them, you haven't said anything for 8 weeks. You haven't said a word. You never contribute anything. Are you getting anything out of it? And I remember this woman saying, oh my God, this has been the most important thing that I've ever experienced in my life. I'm just not ready to speak about it yet, you know. I'm just not— I'm just not ready yet. Yeah.

So let's, uh, go to Heather in Austin's great city, Austin, Texas, and she's on line 3. Hi Heather, thanks for joining the show today.

Hi, hi Dr. Dyer. Hi Diane. Hi, how are you two today?

Just perfect. It's all perfect. Yeah, getting ready to get on an airplane and fly for 14 hours.

I'll just put in that Wishes Fulfilled meditation CD. That'll help you get across.

You are right. Thank you. That's what I use on planes.

I love that one.

I do too. I play it every day.

Yeah. Oh, me too. Me too. And I saw James Twyman here in Austin. I guess it was actually last weekend he was here, and he's quite amazing. What a remarkable musician he is.

He is. He's an amazing— he's an amazing man. He really is. and he's had an amazing life, you know, he's had to overcome some very, very difficult things. This is true, this is true. Yeah, his wife was murdered.

I understand that, and this— so, the whole program has really led to my question for you today. I've studied so much of your work, and I've had so much fun speaking to you before. I'm your gardener friend here in Austin.

Oh, yeah.

So much of what I've learned from you is about our oneness, and you've really been talking about that a lot today, and I will even add One story that I uncovered was Nelson Mandela, when he was in prison, he actually created a garden, a vegetable garden, and that gave him some relief from this horrible situation he was in. And Dr. Dyer, he shared the produce with the guards because he didn't see any separation between himself and even the people imprisoning him.

Yeah, I know that about him. I went to Robben Island where he was imprisoned and sat outside of his cell and meditated. He left me a copy of his book autographed. That was one of the great treasures of my life called A Long Walk to Freedom. And, you know, the other thing about Nelson Mandela is that he went into silence. He wasn't even allowed to talk for years and years and years to anyone. And because he was in that deep silence, when he came out of the silence, he had nothing but forgiveness and reconciliation in his heart. It got rid of— because in silence, you know, Melville said that God God's one and only voice is silence. That's why meditation is so important, it's such a powerful part of the path, is that you get to that place where there's no division. You get to the place of oneness. And because he spent so much of his time in his life in silence, he was able to take a situation in South Africa, which would look like it was going to be just a bloody, bloody mess down there with the violence that they anticipated, and to do it you know, relatively peacefully because of the time that he had spent in conscious contact with God, I believe.

Yeah. So that all of these amazing teachers, and I will include you, you've been an incredible teacher to me and so many others, have taught this, this oneness. And then I currently hear a lot of coaches and people talk about boundaries, and so my question for you is To me, it almost feels like boundaries have lost their meaning to me, this way to protect you from, you know, being hurt by others or taken advantage by others. Or do you feel like boundaries are something that are real and necessary?

I think that the idea of boundaries, we obviously have to keep ourselves protected from people just being abusive and so on toward us. And in their language. But at our essence, at our very— where we all are, where we come from, we're all just individual attributes of God. We all come from the same place, and we all are going to return to the same place. You know, the old thing that T.S. Eliot said, "We shall not cease from exploration, but at the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place from which we originated and to know it for the first time." And there, the concept of boundary or impossible. The concept of boundary— one of the things we do in meditation is try to rid ourselves of any of the lines or any of the borders or any of the boundaries that we've created for ourselves. The most difficult thing that I'm confronting right now and dealing with and writing about and so on is this whole idea of oneness. You know, Larry Dossey wrote an entire book about it called One Mind. I've just been introduced to someone through Deepak on Friday night called Rupert Spira. Who speaks about non-duality. You know, in our core, in our essence, in a deep silence within each and every one of us, that's where we'll find God. Our egos are the part of us that have taken on this belief, this false belief, that who we are is what we accumulate and what we have and separate from other people and, you know, our bodies and where the color of our bodies and where the, you know, the cultural country that our bodies happen to show up in. And, you know, from a deeper perspective, you begin to see the oneness. And our identification with our body and with our accomplishments and with the things that we own and so on is the greatest impediment to our connecting ourselves to God. Once we understand that who we are is connected to everything and everyone in that deepest place and begin to live from that place, boundaries become an artificial thing. But for those who aren't there, boundaries are absolutely necessary in order to keep people from violating other people. So it's a very good point, it's a very good, very good point indeed.

Well, I think we've talked before, but what I'm writing about and working on is our connection with nature, and that's been so powerful and meaningful to me. And I think it's easy, it's approachable for a lot of people when you're in nature to sort of lose that Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

And I think that's a portal to the divine.

I think that for many people who might want to draw a line and say, I'm this color, I'm that religion, or I'm from this country, or any of these different things— when you stand in front of the ocean, you just experience, you know, or you stand in front of a flower, you don't have a need to name it to have the beauty. Yeah. So that's kind of what— and I've been feeling that too. Maybe I'm not so good at the boundary part. Maybe I'm better at the sensing the oneness and everything, and that makes you vulnerable, but, you know, vulnerability is kind of a good thing. It is.

Basically, Heather, it's the misalignment that we have. We've aligned ourselves with the belief that it's only the things that I can experience with my senses. You know, if I can see it, if I can smell it, if I can touch it. Last night I had a dream, and in the dream I was standing at the window of where I have a place on Maui, and the water was coming in and it was taking away the beaches. And with each passing second, more and more water was coming in, and then it came up over the beach, then it came up over the sidewalk, then it came up over the grass, and then the water started coming through the window. And I was telling the kids, in my dream, to make sure that— get those windows closed so that the water doesn't come in. And all of a sudden, I could feel the water, and I could see the color of the sand, and I could see the grass, the color of the grass was green, you know, and I could actually hear the roar of the water. Now, there's 3 sensory things that I was doing. I was seeing, I was hearing, and I was feeling. And yet, I didn't have a body. I didn't have any eyes. I didn't have any ears. I had nothing to touch with. All of that was just laying in the bed, and there I was experiencing without what we call sensory feelings, without any sensory apparatus to do it with. The oneness that I'm speaking about is an awareness that even in waking consciousness— because, you know, Thoreau said, said your goal is to become a waking dreamer, to be able to do everything that you can do in your dream while you're conscious, while you're awake. And we don't need eyes, we don't need ears, we don't need noses, we don't need feelings in order to be able to grasp the essence of what it means to be human. We are so conditioned to believe that, you know, it's what I see with my senses. You know, that's that great line from William Blake, you know, We are all led to believe a lie, he said, when we see with, not through the eye, which was born in a night to perish in a night, while the soul slept in beams of light. And that's why I call it I Am Light. You've got to go to that place within you that's beyond the senses, beyond the feeling, the touching, the smelling, the hearing, and recognize that who we are is capable of experiencing all of that independent of these physical bodies that we're in. And that's the answer to the boundaries issue as well, you know. But listen, I've been on too long. We've just only got a few minutes left. I want to get to at least one more call.

And let's see if we can get one more in. Let's go all the way down to Queens, New York, and Mike on line 9. And we have just about 4 minutes, but go ahead with your question, Mike.

Hello, Dr. Dyer, how are you? I'm great, Mike. I'll try to be very brief because I know we're at the end of the show. You always help me out with a lot of things in my life, and now I've come gotten to a point where, um, I basically grew up in an abusive house. My father hit my mother, you know, cursing, yelling. I'm 36 years old now, you know, married, I've had a child, all that stuff. Um, but most recently he's come back to that person that we've known. He abused her again, you know, we have a lot of problems. I'm stuck in between anger and feeling, um, sorry for forgive me.

No, I, I'm with you, my friend.

Uh, I, you know, I'm in between that line, you know, between anger and, uh, feeling sorry for him because I know that he was also abused. And, and I'm, you know, I try to forgive him, but then sometimes, you know, the rage comes out again because I feel sorry for my mother as well. You know, you run in between, so I'm I'm looking for some type of direction, in a sense, for my emotions.

Because we don't have that much time, but I really want to say that your anger, your judgment, your hostility, your rage, I know about this. I had a father who did the same thing, who abandoned us and walked away, and I never saw him again. And it was only when I went to his grave in 1970 and I was able to send love in response to the hatred that he showed toward me, that everything in my life changed. So, I would say, you know, the Chinese have an old proverb that says, "If you're going to pursue revenge, you'd better dig two graves." Yeah. Because you're going to need one for yourself as well, because it will kill you, this stuff that you've got inside you. Forgiveness, said Mark Twain, forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. You've got to become a violet. And no matter what has crushed you, you've got to be able to send love in response to it. It's the ultimate challenge. It's your purpose. It's why you're here. And when you're able to do that, when you're able to just let go and let God and allow who you are— your essence is you came from love, you came from a place of perfect love. Love is what the universe is made out of. Imagine the universe being made out of anything other than love. What would hold it together? It would all be fighting each other. We'd all, you know, everything would just collapse. Love is the very essence of who we are, what our universe is, what our infinite consciousness is. It's just something called love. And we, through the development of these false selves, through this ego that we take on, create a a space within us that says, "I'm going to send love out." You know, and divine love is the kind of love that you want to have. It's the kind of love that, you know, that God has for you, that infinite consciousness has for you. You know, you showed up in this infinite consciousness. You showed up in it. And as a result of being in it, you can either be what it is, which is love, or you can take on the ego, the false self, and begin and fill yourself with the rage. I would recommend that you reach out to this man and that you send him, you know, the only thing that you want to have inside of you. It's like the proverbial orange. When you squeeze an orange, you get what's inside. When someone squeezes you, you get out of you what's inside. Have love inside, and that's all that will come out. Thanks for your calls. Great show today.

Dr. Dyer has just returned from taping a wonderful event in San Francisco in Inspiration, Your Ultimate Calling for Public Broadcast PBS TV. So today he's going to be talking to us about the topic of finding who we are, finding that kernel within themselves of who we really feel we are. Dr.

Dyer, welcome to the show. Thanks, Summer.

It's nice to be back. Oh, are you feeling good? Not so much traveling on your agenda now, huh? I feel terrific.

I just went to yoga this morning. Did my morning Bikram, sweated it out.

Back to your routine.

Back to my early morning routine.

Yep, I feel great. Oh, great. So how about this topic today? It was inspired by a friend of mine who kind of went through this crisis of identity herself a number of years ago when she was in a bad marriage and she felt she had lost that feeling of who she really was. She felt she was playing a role for her husband and her kids. And I thought, there's a lot of people who've been through that experience. What do you have to say on that matter?

Well, I think many years ago, like about 2,300 to be exact, there was a great entity living on the planet. His name was Patanjali, and I've quoted him frequently. And he spoke about the authentic self and the false self. And the authentic self is the part of us that is exactly who we are. Exactly matched up with our, our source of being, where we came from. And where we came from is this infinite place that has many names. Some call it God, some call it soul, spirit, consciousness. But quantum physics has taught us all that we don't originate from particles, that every tiny little particle, including yourself, originated not from another particle but from an energy field. The ancient Chinese called this energy field the Tao, T-A-O, the Tao. It's pronounced D-A-O. And the Tao is one of the more fascinating things to go to to understand your authentic self. The false self is the part of us that comes from this Tao, from this perfect place, and begins to convince ourselves, because we're surrounded by other people who've convinced themselves, that who we are is not this divine essence of kindness and love love and perfection. It's, um, who we are becomes what we do and what we have and what other people think about us, and we become obsessed with those kinds of things, with collecting things and achieving things and getting other people to like us. And we can also then, as a result of that, begin to believe that who we are is separate from each other and separate from what's missing in our life and separate from God. So we take on this separation kind of thing from, uh, instead of understanding that all of us, everything and everyone in the universe emanates from the same source. So our authentic self is called the Tao. Now, I'm— my next book project, uh, that I'm just going to do for Hay House, and I'm going to start working on it, uh, in fact this afternoon, and I'm going to co-author it. It's the first time I've, I've co-authored a book ever with a dear beautiful soul. Her name is Elizabeth Crowe. She lives here on Maui as well, and we have been talking about this idea for quite a while about the Tao. I had a conversation with her just the other day by telephone and I said, "I think the Tao is really a synonym for God." And she said, "I think it's a synonym for love." I remember reading somewhere in the New Testament that it says, "God is love and he that believeth in love believeth in me and I in him." So that God, love, I think this is when I decided let's do this thing together. Let's have sort of a male and a female version of, or interpretation of it, and let's come together on this. And we're going to call it Living the Tao. I just finished reading a book called A Million Little Pieces. It's on the bestseller list, and it's about a fellow who goes through rehab, and he tells the story exactly as if he's back there going through it. And he was a mighty serious drug addict, addicted to everything. Crack cocaine, alcohol of every kind, every kind of drug that you could get your hands on. He was just a total complete mess. And he got dumped off at this rehab center out in Minnesota, and he tells the story of how he went from that to becoming free of that. And he said that very often while he was in this rehab experience, the people were trying to convince him to practice something that was called the 12 steps, which is a very good and positive force for very, very many people, but it didn't resonate with him. And to get on to, uh, you know, doing this program or that program or this portion of it, and he kept saying to himself, none of that makes any sense to me. What I've got to do is know that within me, deep within me, there's an authentic me that came into this world free of addictions and from well-being, and I've got to reconnect myself to for that. So he started reading the Tao. And the Tao is only like 81 short poems. I'm just going to read the very first one. What Elizabeth and I are going to do is we're going to give her version of interpreting it, my version of interpreting it, and then we're going to come together on it. We're going to talk about it in audiences all over the country. It's a very, very exciting prospect for me because I've lived by the Tao for as many years as I can think of, and I'd like to really get people to go within and answer this question that you're asking here today. Who am I? And here's the opening of the Tao, written by Lao Tzu back 2,500 years ago. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the very same source. The source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding. So the gateway to all understanding is to know that who you you are is that which cannot be described. And the Tao that can be described, it's often said, is not the Tao. That the minute that you try to put a label on yourself and put a name on it and try to come up with an identifying characteristic of this is who I am, who I am is an artist, who I am is a poet, who I am is a mother, who I am is a clerk, who I am— and we go on and on and on with these labels, but then we ask who's in there doing the naming. Who is it that is noticing that you have labeled yourself to be? And that which is in there and noticing and observing is what we call the Tao. And the minute that you try to put a label on it, you destroy it. So the answer to me, to the question, and what we're going to— what Elizabeth and I are going to try to answer in this undertaking of talking to people about taking these 81 observations from this beautiful teacher from way, way back 2,500 years ago. And applying it is what we're going to call living the Tao, living it every single day. Because if people, if the world lived the Tao, which is just love, and lived in a state called God realization or love realization, was always operating from this place of love, then we would be, as I just read in there, we would be free from all desires. And then the minute that we get ourselves free from those desires, we would start to realize that, uh, who we are is that which is noticing everything. And who we are is really nothing more than love. Who we are is nothing more than this perfect, beautiful, unnamable, eternally real, infinite being that, um, once you get it and once you understand that, you not only do you get freed free from the mystery, but you get free from worrying about whether everything is going to work out the way you think it should work out. If you see yourself as an infinite, eternal being, infinite, eternal being, just think of that. Try to get a hold of that concept of infinity and eternal. What you are doing is, from that perspective, you start saying, "Well, that is real." Lao Tzu said, "That is real." real, which never changes. So if you're in a world of the changing, you know, all of your objects, all of the material that you have, all of the money that you're worried about, all your children, your family, all of this is in the world of the changing. It's not real, it's not authentic. It's all going to be dust. All that composes is going to be decomposing. But the part of you that is real, who you really are, is invisible, formless, and is really God or love. And if you can live from that that perspective of being God and being love, being a piece of what you came from, all of your desires and all of your fears and all of your worries and all of your anxieties just dissolve and dissipate. I'm very excited about writing this and getting involved in it this afternoon.

We have a caller waiting on the line from Sydney, Australia. Jennifer, I think she's been waiting for us for quite some time, so let's hear that pressing question. Jennifer, welcome to the show. Jennifer, are you, are you there? With us right now. Oh, Jennifer, Jennifer in Sydney, Australia. I see you, don't hear you. Yes, hello. Oh, there you are. Wonderful. Welcome. What's your question? You're live on air with Dr. Wayne Dyer. Okay, I can't hear very well. Well, go ahead and just ask your question then, and we may answer it off air. Okay, my question is— hello, Wayne, and thank you for taking my my call. You're welcome. And thank you for all the lovely tapes and books you've put out. It certainly made my life a better place.

Oh, that's great. Thank you.

My question is, I've been in a relationship and it's been quite a rocky experience, and, uh, I'm confused if anything's possible, whether I should keep that thought or whether I'm being unrealistic, I guess you could say.

The answer to that question is yes, of course anything is possible. But the more important to ask yourself is, can I make a choice to be happy? And can I feel good when I'm in this relationship? And I'm— am I in it, or am I always anticipating what it's going to be or what I would like it to be? I think it's really important to— Sai Baba taught me that it's very important to reach for the golden And the golden ring is to reach up and to always be extending yourself into a direction of being with people and surrounded by energy and surrounded by people who bring you love and light and kindness and happiness and fulfillment and joy and these kinds of energies. If you are with people who are dragging or you feel you have to reach down to instead of reaching up for the golden ring, you are reaching down and trying to find a way to be happy with this person and their behaviors that are not working for you, whether they are angry behaviors or irresponsible behaviors or addictive behaviors or anything that is in a different energy level than you are in, then you want to find yourself just extending yourself in a different direction. And as you do that, this person will either come along or you will be moving on and finding yourself in a much greater state of joy. That's my take on whether it's possible. I think all things are possible, but I don't think that you should be reaching down and letting yourself be dragged down in any relationship by anyone.

Jennifer, are you able to hear us? Because sometimes I wonder, then am I just abandoning that person?

The thing of it is, it isn't really about abandoning somebody else. It's really about allowing yourself to be touched by God and to be touched by the love that you have. You have a much greater chance of helping that person to be whatever it is that you think you're doing. It sounds like you're taking on a nurturing role here. There's a wonderful book written many years ago called Smart Women, Foolish Choices, I think. Okay. And there are so many very intelligent, bright, sharp, attractive, fantastic, spiritually advanced women who make these foolish choices, believing that it is their role to somehow nurture this person and bring this person to— you know, it's like you don't want to be a mother to someone that you're in a relationship with. The best thing that you can do for that person is to provide them with a model of someone who believes in herself and thinks that she's worthy of being treated with respect and thinks that she's worthy of actualizing her own destinies and so on, rather than spending her life energies in trying to get somebody else to grow up. Does that make sense, or is it—

oh no, it certainly does. Yeah.

And so, and you're, you're not abandoning that person. What you're doing is you're continuing to enable that person to misuse you and to be abusive and disrespectful to you by sticking around and hoping that they'll suddenly find themselves. They'll find themselves when they realize that you're not the kind of a person who's willing to hang around and wait for them to be mature or to be smart or to be sober or whatever it is that they're doing that is not functional in your life and in your relationship. Be that intelligent, brilliant, sensational divine genius that you came into the world to be. And if you've got people hanging around you who don't accept that and don't regard you in that way, then, you know, your best bet is to move on and help them to reach up for the golden ring rather than to reach down and wallow around in their own ineffectiveness. Sorry. Sounding a little harsh this morning, but that's exactly how I feel about women. Smart women, foolish choices. Don't be one of those.

Jennifer, thank you for your call. I do appreciate it. I go for my walks every day like you recommend, and I always think, "I wonder what Wayne Dyer would say." There you go.

Yeah, well, you've heard it.

Thank you. Thank you very much. God bless you. Namaste. Take care. Dr. Dyer, we've got another caller on the line for you. We've got Cher in Alexandria, Virginia. Welcome to the program, and, uh, what do you have to discuss with Dr. Dyer today? Hi, Cher. Hi, how are you, Dr. Dyer? I'm great.

I love your records. I used to watch you with Sonny years ago on this television. I only wish— oh, that's not you.

Sorry, no, sorry, wrong person. I feel very honored to speak with you.

Thank you, likewise.

And I want you to know that you have played a very large part in my spiritual development over over the years. And thank you, thank you.

Oh, you're very welcome.

I know who I am. I know that truthfully, I do know that I am God and you are God and everybody, right? We are all God. We are all pieces of God.

We are all pieces of God. One of my very favorite quotes that said— that was offered by Sai Baba when they asked him, are you God? Thinking that they had trapped him, he said, yes, I am, and so are you. He said, the only difference between me and you is that I know it and you doubt it. When you don't doubt it, then you have God consciousness and the ability to live the Tao.

Yes, yes, yes. My question today is about manifesting, and it's not so much things. It's manifesting a higher spiritual level, getting to the next level of spirituality. When I meditate and when I manifest, or when I try to manifest, it to me seems like I'm disconnected. And just in business, you know, my life, everything, I try not to ask for things but to grow in every level and every aspect of my life. But there are always setbacks for me. Like what? There are a lot of things going on with me spiritually that I am trying to understand, and I just don't feel like I am getting any answers. And also with business, I am in my 5th year of business. Last year was a fantastic year. I was in my 4th year last year. It was fantastic. Every year before that had gotten better and better, but this year I've really gone through a slump. So these are the things that I am asking for and trying to understand and trying to pull myself out of slump and trying to get to the next level.

So here's the deal. I told you I'm studying the Tao now and I'm really sort of immersed in this idea of being able to live the this principle is that you're hooked on being someplace else instead of being here now, being where you are. You're hooked on obstacles rather than on fulfillment. Listen to these words from the Tao: Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Here's the advice it gives: "Do your work, then step back. This is the only path to serenity." You already have everything that you're seeking for. You don't need a higher spiritual place to be. You're in it right in this moment. If you could just step outside of yourself and observe yourself seeking and struggling and trying to get more and trying to be someplace else, if you could observe yourself doing that from an eternal perspective, you'd literally laugh at yourself. You'd say, "What a fool I've been. The only thing I have is now. The only thing I have is what I'm observing." Become the observer. Become the witness. Banish all of that doubt and particularly all of that struggle and that judging all of the things that are coming your way. You know, Rumi said, "Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment." Be in a state of bewilderment. Thanks, Sharon. God bless you. All right.

Let's go to Teresa. We've got time for one last caller. Teresa in Rochester, New York. Teresa, welcome. Welcome to the show. What's your question very quickly for Wayne Dyer today? Hi, Dr. Dyer. Hi. Well, I just got back from the I Can Do It conference in Orlando, Florida. Oh, yeah. Which was true— you were truly inspirational. Thank you.

It was a great morning.

I remember it well, yes. I read your book, The Power of Intention. While I was there, I attended Gary Renard's workshop. Right. When I came home, I read The Disappearance of the Universe. And I'm trying to just make some connections for myself between creating and perceiving.

Yeah, he goes pretty heavy into the Course in Miracles, which can be a little heavy, I think is the right word for it. I mean, it's great. I love that book and I endorse it. But it's really about— because they talk so much about illusion, what is real and what isn't real. The best line from the Course, I think, of all of them is, "The only mistake, the only error that you need to correct is your belief in your separation from God." As soon as you understand that you and God are one, that you must be like what you came from, that's what I think the Course is trying to teach. And if you can get that, you know, then you don't have to get bogged down in whether my perceptions are real or whether they're not real. Just don't separate yourself from God. That's the thing that I think the course is best at teaching. Okay.

Okay. All right, Teresa, thank you.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you very much.

God bless you, and thank you for your nice comments.

Deep, deep question. I know you read and very much enjoyed that book. That reminds me, I loved it. Gordon Smith had a little hello to say to you today. Had the chance to talk to him at 11 this morning. Oh, did you? Yes, he wanted to convey his hellos to you and his admiration.

Well, ask him how I'm doing.

I will.

You know, I always see these psychic guys every time I go up to them and say, how am I? He would answer too. Well, Dr.

Dyer, that was a terrific show today. Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe.

To live with less stress and more peace, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it.

Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. I have to remind myself to calm down as well because I have a very busy I guess a busy schedule or a busy life. I have, uh, you know, 8 children and lots of people that I take care of and