Wayne Dyer - Even Impossible Things will MANIFEST for You!

I don't think that the way that you get things into your life is by just telling yourself, I want them, I need more, I have to have more. So I need a new Mercedes in my driveway, and I need a new Rolex on my— I need to have all of these things. I need to get this job. That to me, the way that you begin to manifest those kinds of things is to move into an alignment that is aligned with how source works. There's so many paradoxes in the Tao. There's so many. You can only achieve fulfillment when you achieve emptiness. You can only hear answers by silencing your mind. This is half of the Tao. You can only become rich by knowing already that you have enough. You all have to know that and not be consumed with more. If you say to the universe, give me, give me, give me, the universe's response back will be exactly the same. You're aligned with that. It will align and give you experiences that match your desire. It'll say, give me, give me, give me, and you'll constantly feel under pressure and never able to arrive. You can see magical things begin to happen when you make that shift. Wayne Dyer was an icon in self-development and spiritual growth. He wrote over 40 books with an astonishing 21 New York Times bestsellers. His childhood was spent in orphanages and foster homes, but he'd go on to inspire millions and become known as the father of motivation. In this exclusive speech from the Celebrate Your Life stage, Wayne Dyer shares with us the hidden teachings of Lao Tzu and how to live in harmony with the universe, move from ambition to meaning, and activate the power of manifesting. Special thanks to Liz Dawn for partnering with us to release this exclusive content on our YouTube channel. Enjoy. The message of change your thoughts, change your life began to unfurl for me a couple of years ago. I am now 67. 67, and on the 11th of May 2005, the day after I turned 65, strange things were happening for me up until leading up to that time. And the strange things that were happening were that I found myself being called to something new in my life. I've always noticed that when something significant is about to take place, when some change is going to take place in my life, that there's a kind of a calling. There's a kind of a— you start thinking different kinds of things, and your life begins to take on a whole different kind of meaning, which I'll be talking about a little bit later on. And what Carl Jung called synchronistic events begin to show up, things that you just— you can't really put your finger on, but they, they just keep happening over and over and over again. And I've learned— I think we call these subtle signals from the the divine mind. And the more you pay attention to these, the more you begin to realize that your, your life is moving from, uh, from ambition, which is focused on, um, what's in it for me and how much can I get and how much money am I going to make and what are my goals and so on. You move from ambition to meaning, and anything that has to do with trying to get ahead or trying to make more money or trying to have more prestige and so on begins to take a back seat in your life as you move into the afternoon of your life and into the time when living on purpose and fulfilling an internal dharma, an internal kind of something that you know is calling you, something that you may have signed up for even before you entered into this world of form. And as that becomes clearer and clearer to you, these signals are things that you pay a whole lot more attention to than you used to. And you don't treat anything as an accident. You don't treat anything as a coincidence. These things that we call coincidences, these kinds of events, really that word coincidence comes from the word coincide. And in mathematics, two angles that fit together perfectly are said to be two angles that coincide. We've taken a term that means something that fits together perfectly and interpreted it to mean through our intellect something that shows up accidentally. And there is no accidents in a universe that has a divine intelligence behind it. There can be no accidents. Even the person you're sitting next to today is a part of the perfection of it all. And the fact that you're here today, and the fact that you believe that the people who really need to be at this conference have stayed home, uh, the fact is they're exactly where they belong. And I began to notice this shift, this change in my life, and I wasn't quite sure what it was, but I always know— I remember when Arthur Miller, the great American playwright, was being interviewed at the age of 89 in the New York Times, and he had a play off-Broadway at the age of 89 that he had just written. And the interviewer for the New York Times said to him, "Are you working on another play?" And I loved his response. He said, "I don't know, but I probably am." And that kind of an answer, that kind of a response indicates to me that he knew the difference between motivation and inspiration. Because motivation is when a motivated person— and we try to motivate our children, and we try to motivate ourselves— and motivation is when you get a hold of an idea and you just plow through and you take it through to its logical conclusion, and you don't let anything interfere with your objectives. And things that we call obstacles, you just go around them, or you go through them, or you pay somebody to get them out of your way. And and off you go. That's motivation. Inspiration is the exact reverse. Inspiration isn't you getting a hold of an idea and taking it where it was intended to go. It's an idea gets a hold of you and it takes you where you originally signed up to go in the first place, but you got waylaid. You let your ego get in the way. You let something stop you and keep you from where you wanted to go. And this idea that there is something that is bigger than you are, that is bigger than all of us, that we originated from, that we— you know, T.S. Eliot said, "We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place from which we originated and to know it for the first time." To know it. Returning. In the Tao, the 40th verse of the Tao Te Ching says that the way of Tao is a return trip and that we all are able and capable of returning to the place from which we came without having to die in doing so. To die while we're alive is what Lao Tzu asks us to look at, to return to that place, to live a God-realized life, if you will. And this calling was getting bigger and bigger for me. I go back for a few moments to something that happened to me in the year 2000 when I turned 60. And I was in a little town in the northern part of Italy, just a little bit south of Florence, called Assisi, where I was writing a book, working on a book, and lecturing about the life of one of the great beings who ever walked on this planet, a Christ consciousness soul named Saint Francis. Saint Francis. Of Assisi. He's calling now. And before I went on that trip, I had visited a physician who specialized in knees. And this right knee of mine was bone on bone from years and years and years of running obsessively. I ran 8 miles every day for 22 years without missing one day between '76 and '98. And some called that obsessive. OCD. But I used to say, you brush your teeth every day, you don't call that obsessive. You make a poopy every day, you don't call that obsessive. This is what I do every day. But my joints were paying a price for that kind of pounding and pounding, and I had to wear a brace on my knee whenever I played tennis or whenever I ran. The pain was getting worse and worse, but I was really committed to not having this thing replaced, going in and having surgery and putting artificial parts in my body just didn't resonate with me. And, uh, on this particular trip, there was a young man on this trip. My wife was there, and, uh, we had taken, uh, 25 or 30 people to several places in Europe, spiritual places. One was Lourdes, where we did— we walked through the grotto and did the whole thing. If you haven't done that in your lifetime, I really encourage you to do that over in France. It's an experience that you'll never ever ever forget, where 15,000 people come together in this little town in France and they all march where Saint Bernadette, this woman who had these visions, 18 visions back in the 1850s and 1860s, and people that were being healed by this water, this holy water. And so, so I wanted, I always wanted to see that and be there, and people all just line up, and all of the wounded people, all of the sick people, all of the people who really need help and who are praying for some kind of healing are at the front of the line, the people in wheelchairs, people on stretchers, and so on. And there's nobody organizing anything. There's nobody telling people what to do or how to get there. And everybody has candles, and you just get candles. You just— they're for sale all throughout the town, and you just pick them up and you walk through the entire town with nobody organizing anything, nobody telling anybody. There are people there from the Philippines, from Japan, from Africa, from all over Asia, North America, South America. People don't even speak the same language, and everybody is just shoulder to shoulder marching, and they're playing Ave Maria, Ave Maria throughout the entire village on these speakers that are posted everywhere. And you have a sense. I remember when we came back and I said to my wife, I said, 15,000 people. This goes on every single night between April 15th and October 15th in this little village, and nobody organized it or anything. We left there, we took a bus over to Paris, got into the hotel room and turned on the television set. And what was happening was over in the Middle East, in Israel and Palestine, there were about 100 people throwing rocks at each other back and forth. You remember that time? I think Ramallah, I believe it was. They were just— there was all of this horror stuff going on, but it was just about 100 people. And every network, CNN, all of them were carrying these 100 people trying to kill each other. And just over here There are 15,000 people showing up every day just to be in peace. And it happens every single day between April and October, and nobody's reporting on it. It's not in the news. It should give you just a little sense of, you know, the idea that for every act of evil in the world, there are a million acts of kindness. And why not put your attention on them? And then you wouldn't be experiencing this world. Because Einstein said, probably the most important decision you'll ever make is to decide whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe. And if you believe you live in a hostile universe, you'll be looking for occasions to defend that and explain that. And you'll be constantly reminding yourself of it, and you'll be reading newspaper accounts and turning on televisions. And I have found at this time in my life that that is just stuff that I'm not a part of at all. I'm not in a world that's at war. I'm in a world that is at peace and creating more and more and more of it. That's how I choose to live. And that's where I choose to be. Thank you. And when enough of us, when enough of us begin to think this way and act this way, you know, after a while you'll get to a point, which is where I am now, where even if someone hands me a Time magazine and I start going through it, it doesn't take but 4 or 5 pages before I start feeling something happening in here that isn't right. It doesn't resonate quite with me about how many people were blown up over here and How many people were killed over here? Like, that information is no longer newsworthy to me. It is something that I just don't want to identify myself with. I want to put my attention on making this kind of world, the world that Lao Tzu envisioned 2,500 years ago. Anyway, after Lourdes, we went to Assisi. And Assisi is the home where Francesco, back in the 13th century, this little man had this conversion. He did the U-turn, what we call the Saul to Paul moment, that moment of from being someone who was a warrior and a womanizer to being someone who took off all of his clothes and gave his whole life over to serving Christ, to serving God, and being in that way and traveling all over promoting this, and ultimately became the man for whom the city of San Francisco was named. And while we were there, we had this 20 people, and there was a young man named John Zeebold, And John had cerebral palsy, so he had braces on his legs. Each of them weighed 25 pounds, each brace. So he had 50 pounds of braces on his legs, and he was about 6 foot 2, my height. And we were going up this castle to the place where Francisco was buried, and to get a better view of the land from where he had all of his great healings and where the animals You know, Patanjali once said that when you are steadfast— steadfast means you never slip— when you are steadfast in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed towards yourself and others, then all living creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence. When you're steadfast, if you live at Siddhi consciousness, Christ consciousness, if you live at the highest level of consciousness and you never slip because that's who you are, as it says in the Tao, a man of Tao is kind to the kind and kind to the unkind because kindness is his nature. It's all he has to give away. When that becomes your nature, literally becomes your nature, everything changes. The world that you're in changes. Not only does everything change, but if you listen to David Hawkins in Power Versus Force, you begin to impact everyone around you with that kind of consciousness yourself. So, um, St. Francis was one of these beings that wild animals, it was reported, you know, who were killing all of the cattle When they would approach St. Francis, these wolves and so on, they would become like domesticated little animals. And there's many actual accounts, you know, historical accounts, accurate accounts of the reports of the way that even the birds and so on. If you ever want to see the whole story of Francisco, who for me is one of— I feel like I'm in his heart. See, just go rent Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Franco Zeffirelli's incredible film done in 1975. It's one that you should own, should have it in your home. It's just, just the music and the sweetness of it, and it's a deeply, profoundly touching movie. And just speaking incidentally off of movies, I just saw the other day a film that I would really recommend that you see. It's called The Devil Came on Horseback. It's out now on Netflix, and it's, it's the story of what's happening in Darfur right now with the Janjaweed. And so on, just watch it. The devil came on horseback. So in Assisi, which I have been to on many occasions and went there to write, because the book Spiritual Solution to Every Problem was based upon the prayer of St. Francis, which for me was really not so much a prayer but a technology, which really taught us, you know, where there is hatred, just bring love. And not only do you get rid of the hatred, but you convert hatred to love. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy. Where there is despair, hope, and so on. And teaching people how to live from this place, this highest place, which is what this talk here is dedicated to. Once you get that, you— you know, it was said that the laws of the material world do not apply in the presence of the God-realized. The laws of the material world The laws that we think of are inviolable, they don't apply in the presence of the God-realized. It's why when Jesus would have a thought of food and there were hungry people around, you know, then the bread would appear and the fish, the gift of fish and loaves would show up. When you reach what Hawkins calls the 1000 level, and that 1000 level is just divine, divine being, steadfast. Never slipping. You can see magical things begin to happen when you make that shift. So we were walking up this old castle, and at the, uh, about halfway up the circular staircase on the inside of the castle, John was in front of me, 21, 22 years old, and he had his braces. And the way he would go up the steps was that he would take this leg out here like this, and then he would do this and then he would balance himself, and then he would take this leg and he would do this, okay? And then he'd get up to that step. Then he would do the same thing again and again, and that's how he would get up. But he didn't count on the fact that the staircase was narrowing as we went up higher and higher to a point where he couldn't lift his leg out like this at all. There was no room. We were— so can you get the picture? And there were hundreds of people going up, so there were people down below And John said to me, he turned around and he said, he said, I can't go up any further. I can't bend my legs and I can't go down steps because you can imagine what it would be like to try to go back down. You need to do this. You need to bend your knees in order to go back down. And he had these braces on. So he said, what am I going to do? What am I going to do, Dr. Wooddyer? What am I going to do? I said, what you're going to do is you're going to get on my back and just wrap your arms around my back and I'll carry you up the rest of the way. I had forgotten to wear my brace because I didn't think I was going to need it because I wasn't running or playing tennis, which is when I— so I just sort of limped through life in those days. And I put him on my back and I started to walk up the rest of the steps, and all of a sudden my knee gave out. And I just had a flash of the headlines in the Assisi Daily News, you know, American author shows up here with all of these people and the whole piled up at the bottom. You know, we had to bury the whole group of them at once. It was just— and as my knee began to collapse, as it began to just, you know, I was going down with him on my back, suddenly I saw a vision of Saint Francis, of Francesco. And I had lectured about him the night before, particularly about his ability to, uh, to live at a God-realized place, which is this place where you never slip, this place where the only thing that comes out of you is kindness. Regardless of what comes at your direction, where judgment is impossible, where hostility and anger towards others is not a possibility because you don't have that to give away, but all you have to give away is love, which is exactly where you came from and where you'll return to. In A Course in Miracles, there's a reference to Jesus, and it says Jesus speaking to the rest of us, saying, if you want to be like me, knowing that we are alike, I will help you. If you want to be different than me, I will wait until you change your mind. And you will change your mind. You may have to die, but you will change your mind. But why not change your mind and live and be living at this high God-realized place that Lao Tzu wrote about 500 years before Jesus showed up on this planet? That's 5 centuries before. As my knee was collapsing, I was going down and this vision of St. Francis, I suddenly righted myself and this knee didn't hurt at all. Not only did it not hurt, but I was infused with such an overwhelming sense of energy and there was actually an odor. It was like roses. It was a floral kind of thing. It was this beautiful feeling and odor in the air. And I didn't walk up the steps with John, I ran up 3 flights of stairs on a circular with this 220 to 250-pound man on my back. And I was running up the steps like this, like this. And I got to the top and my wife was standing up there waiting. And she said, "What the hell are you doing? Everybody's panting. Everybody's out of breath." I said, "I don't know. Strange just happened. I feel so— she said, but you've got John on your back and you're running up the steps. What about your leg? Oh my— I said, something happened to my leg. And I went over to the balcony, to the edge of the balcony. There was a woman on that trip who did nothing but record everything with her, with her film. She was taking pictures, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, all the time. And she snapped a picture of me with my hands together giving thanks to Saint Francis. For what had just happened. And I didn't even— I mean, it all happened so quickly. And that became the COVID of— if you have that book, does anybody have a copy of that here? But that's not the purpose of my telling you this story. That was 7 years ago. That knee, by the way, 7 years ago, I've never had any surgery since then. I've never worn a brace since. And I can run on it, I can swim on it, I can play tennis on it, I can do yoga on it. I can— it's just— it's It's every once in a while I get just a little stiffness in it, but it's totally been— and I've never been back to the orthopedic surgeon who told me that it would have to be replaced. I just don't want to see any X-rays or anything that— now, the reason I tell that story is because my interpretation of that was up until I started— until Lao Tzu came back into my life, until the This book, the Tao Te Ching, which is— some people call the wisest book ever written. In 81 short verses, which you could read in an afternoon, you can have a prescription for how to live a God-realized life and how to eliminate hatred and anger and bitterness and war and arguments and sickness and depression and worry and fear. All of the stuff that are so much a part of our lives, if you really look at it and begin to to put it into practice and to live it, which is what I decided to do. But my interpretation of that was I was in a CC, I was writing a book about the prayer of Saint Francis, I was a chosen person, I was chosen because I'm special. It was my ego was interpreting that I had this wonderful gift of healing show up in my life because I was on the right path, because I was doing good things, because I I knew about St. Francis because I had brought these people here, all of that kind of stuff that was going on. And I've carried that vision around with me and really thought, I'm just special, you know, and I get to have things like that because, you know, because I'm cool, you know, or because I'm, you know, me and God are like this. And then I began to read the Tao in the hidden teachings of, it's called the Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu. It's called the Huahuching. And the Huahuching is 81 verses also, some attributed to Lao Tzu. And historically and accurately, we don't even know who Lao Tzu was. The word means old man in ancient Chinese. We don't even know if it was one person or many or whatever, which is because there's no accurate historical records of it. But in reading this, let me just share with you on the 59th verse. If you wish to become a divine immortal angel, then restore the angelic qualities of your being through virtue and service. This is the only way, said Lao Tzu, to gain the attention of the immortals who teach the methods of energy enhancement and integration that are necessary to reach the divine realm. These angelic teachers cannot be sought out. It is they who seek out the student. Now, you have to listen to that. If you're listening to this on tape, you have to listen to this several times. If you wish to become a divine immortal angel, then restore the angelic qualities of your being through virtue. Now, virtue, the word T-E in Tao Te Ching— Tao, T-A-O, means the way. T-E means the virtue. Ching means book in ancient Chinese. So it's the book of living the virtue of the Great Way. It's the virtue. It's the virtue. And the virtue, there are four. I mean, there are many, but I've summarized four of these virtues. The virtues are reverence for all of life and my sacred space, that. It's not a funeral home. We don't kill things in there. Reverence for all of life, which is manifested as respect for yourself and others. Like living this virtue. When you live this virtue, it's like a lot of people think that if I've got something, if I'm sick, if I've got cancer, if I'm in pain, if things aren't going well, then I will pray to God and God will then offer me the assistance or the help that I need. And the assumption behind that method of prayer is that God is a withholding God and has the capacity to heal you, but is going to do so only if you pay certain penance and do things a certain way according to whatever religion you have. I've always thought that the interesting difference between people who talk about their religion and people who talk about spirituality is that people who promote their religion almost always want to argue about it, whereas people who promote spirituality always want to share it. It's an interesting distinction, isn't it? Yeah. So this idea of reverence for all and the idea that you don't pray to God for healing. You do what St. Francis said, where there is darkness, let me bring light. Make me an instrument of thy well-being is a good prayer. Let me remember to return to that from which I came, which is a place of well-being. Let me just return to that. And the way that you return to that is not by asking for special assistance from God who's withholding it, who has it, isn't going to keep— God is not a withholding God. The source is not a withholding source. It's an abundant source. It's returning to virtue. Returning to virtue. The second is natural sincerity, which manifests as honesty, simplicity, and faithfulness. So natural sincerity, being a sincere person who is honest, simple, and faithful. The third of these four virtues is gentleness, which manifests as kindness and consideration for others. And the last is supportiveness, which manifests as service to others. So Lao Tzu was offering us in the hidden teachings of Lao Tzu that you cannot seek out the help that you want or the miracle that you're looking for. It's one of the reasons why I'm not a part of this thing called The Secret, which has been so popular and has really taught people about, you know, that there is an alignment and there is a capacity for us to be able to attract into our lives what we would like to have based upon realigning ourselves so that we're in harmony with the way the Divine Mind works. And we get ourselves thinking like God thinks, which is another one of those observations of Einstein when he said, "I don't really care about the details of quantum physics. I just want to learn to think like God thinks." Thinking like God thinks means thinking about giving and serving and living those virtues that I just described. Those virtues, when you live them to an extreme, to an extreme, where you're— and isn't that who a Saint Francis was? Isn't that who Jesus was? Isn't that who a Buddha was? I mean, one of my favorite stories told of Buddha is that wherever he would go, people would criticize him, people would find fault with him, people would humiliate him. They would throw stones at him. They would talk about what a fool he was, this prince who had just gone out there, Prince Siddhartha, who had gone out there to teach and preach. And finally his devotees said to him, I don't understand that. How can you maintain your sense of love and kindness towards those people who are so nasty to you, who are always criticizing you, who are humiliating you? And he said, I can only answer your question with a question. He said, if someone offers you a gift and you do not accept that gift, to whom does the gift belong? So if someone offers you a gift of their criticism and you don't accept it, who owns it? And why would you be upset about something that is owned by someone else. It has nothing to do with me. That's being steadfast. That's the virtue. The virtue of being able to ignore it and to love regardless. So on that day in 2000, the healing that took place— I have finally figured it out. It was because in that moment, without thinking, without processing, without analyzing, without doing anything, I completely forgot about myself and what was going on with my leg or whatever. It was just a natural thing. It wasn't anything I processed or tried to figure out. And this is going to make me really look good, you know, with all— it was nothing like that. It was like, John, you're in need and you're hurting, get on my back. And when I moved into that space, into that pure loving space of reverence for his life and being gentle and kind and simple and faithful and honest and just putting him on my back, that's when the miracle occurs. It was because I was able to get out of my ego, to get out of who I think I am, and to instead merge into God consciousness. And that's why when I was asked to be a part of The Secret, I said the emphasis is too much on what's in it for me and not enough on how may I serve. And I don't choose to be a part of that because I don't think that the way that you get things into your life is by just telling yourself, I want them, I need more, I have to have more. So I need a new Mercedes in my driveway and I need a new Rolex on my arm and I need to have all of these things. I need to get this job. That to me, the way that you begin to manifest those kinds of things is to move into an alignment that is so aligned with how source works, how God works. You know, Hafiz, the great 13th century poet from the Sufis from the Middle East, Persian poet, he said, even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, you owe me. Just think what a love like that can do. It lights up the whole world. It lights up the whole world. It's moving into God-realization or God-consciousness to such a point where it becomes extreme and you're forgetting about what's in it for you, or not asking for a thank you or expecting anything. It's just in that space of God-realized giving that the laws of the material world no longer apply. I mean, how do you get a bone-on-bone knee to stop doing what it was doing? If that isn't a miracle— it may not seem like anything to you, but when your knee starts to go, you notice it with every step. And to have that be gone from your life in a moment of unconditional, total, complete surrender and living God consciousness That's what the Tao teaches, and it teaches it to us in such a simple, simple way that the only thing I can say to you is align yourself with the place from which you came. Realign yourself so that you can get your ego out of the way. Because in the first 9 months, in the Tao it says that you're doing nothing. You're doing nothing. You're just being done. In the first 9 months of your life, the time of your conception to the time of your birth, you were being done. You didn't worry about it. You didn't agonize over it. You didn't say, my God, I just saw a sonogram and I don't even have a nose yet. What if it doesn't show up? And what if it's on the wrong side? Or what if it's, you know, you don't do that. You just surrender. You just let go and let God. You just allow. It's just, it's a perfect sort of surrendering process. And you know, sitting here today, you know that everything you've needed for this physical journey was all handled in that split second when you went from nowhere to now here, when you went from the invisible to the visible. In the Tao, it says that all being comes from non-being, from non-being. When Jesus put it, he said, it's the spirit that gives life, the flesh counts for nothing. You didn't come from a particle. Particles come from the invisible. From the formless, from the boundaryless, from the timeless. That's your origination point. That's what quantum physics has taught us, that the tiniest, tiniest sub-sub-subatomic particle, when you put it in a particle accelerator right here in your state and you rev it up at 250,000 miles an hour and collide it, and you open it up to see where did these tiniest, tiniest little particles come from, what's their origination, what do they look like, there's nothing there. There's just space. There's just the emptiness. It's what began you. It's what you are returning to. And everything that you needed for this physical journey was handled. You don't really think that you're in charge of this body, do you? If I was, I wouldn't have hairs growing out of my ears and my nose when I could have them here. I mean, I would make a different choice, wouldn't I? And so you know that there's a part of you in the Tao You know, it's like, I love the 10th verse of this. It says, this is really one of the great ones to grasp. It says, the ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle, totally fascinated by the realm of the senses. It swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center watching, and then forget that you are there. That's all you have to do. So the first 9 months of your life, you're in this place of total surrender and letting go, and then you pop out and you're surrounded by people who say, "That's really good work." That was really great. We'll take over from here. And that's the mistake. That's when you take on the ego, when you edge God out. E-G-O. When you edge God out. And as you edge God out and take over for yourself, imagine if you never edged God out, if you never took on the ego, if you just continued to allow yourself to go through this experience, this fiction of life and death, as Lao Tzu calls it. If you would just allow it without interfering. That's one of the great messages of the Tao. Let go, do little, accomplish great things by thinking small rather than thinking big. Find your nature. Hi there, my name is Liz Dawn and I am the co-creator of Celebrate Your Life events. And I hope you're loving this amazing workshop with the late and great Dr. Wayne Dyer. This was recorded live at one of our Celebrate Your Life conferences. And I'm so excited that we could share this very special workshop with all of the Evan Carmichael fans. And to learn more about us, just click the link below and visit celebrateyourlife.com. Lao Tzu was alive at the time of Confucius. Confucius was, they say, 40 to 50 years his junior, and he came to visit Lao Tzu, and he left, and if you saw the PBS special I did on this, that he called him a dragon. He said, "I spent this time with this being and he's a dragon. I can't figure him out." Because Confucius was concerned with etiquette, what Serena was concerned with when she was 10 years old, with doing things the right way, with where your fork goes and where you place your napkin and all of that stuff. And Lao Tzu thought that that was just absurd. It was just too silly, just like he thought religion was It's just too absurd, too silly to come up with rules. In fact, he said, anytime you do anything that you do because the rule says that you can do it, you've left the Tao. You've left the Tao. Don't you just watch in amazement and horror as we take young people who've been in this country— there's 1.8 million of them— whose only crime is that they were babies who were brought into this country by their parents, and who are American in every way they could possibly be. I mean, they eat pizza and have iPods and, you know, and now we're— because the rules allow us to do so, we're rounding them up and sending them off to a country they don't even know and to speak a language they don't even know because the rules give us the right to do that. We've left the Dao. We need policies that are based on compassion and caring and kindness, not on rules. Rules. And I guarantee you If they get a wall all the way across the southern border of this country, including this state, that's 12-foot high, there's going to be a major sale on 13-foot ladders. And we need to find another way, just like we need to find another way to do so many of the things. And my calling— I'm re-emerging myself into the Tao Te Ching and the Huahu Jing, to re-emerge myself in that. My calling is Not because I believe that my generation back in the '60s, my generation, our job was to end a war, and it was a horrible war. 55,000 Americans dead for no reason, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people napalmed and so on. It was a horrible time. I took my doctoral orals on May 4th, 1970, the day of Kent State. You remember, Joan? Kent State, I'm sure. I could hardly speak to defend my doctoral dissertation. We had put live bullets to protest people— I mean, to deal with the protesters against that war— and killed 4 of them at Kent State. It was a major turning point. So if my generation's job was to end a war, this generation's job, with the help of Lao Tzu, is to end the concept of war, the whole idea of war. Yeah, and we will do it. Because if we don't, as Einstein also said, I don't know what they'll fight World War III with. I don't know what weapons they'll use, but I know that in World War IV they'll use sticks and stones. We'll have to start all over. Do we really want to have our legacy be to our children and our grandchildren and their grandchildren that we have amassed enough weapons to destroy all of life on our planet, and we've created weapons that we can't even use because if we use them We'll kill ourselves. How do we explode a bomb filled with radiation and expect the winds to just blow it over there? That's where we've come to with our ideas that are so removed from what Lao Tzu spoke about in the period of the Warring States. That's why he left and dictated these 81 verses at the gatekeeper. He dictated these 81 verses, and in dictating them, he left to decide to live away from war. He said just the idea of that I and enemy can exist in the same sentence is something that I can no longer live with. I go back now to the day after my 65th birthday, and it's the 11th of May, and I call Maya, my secretary, who's here. I don't know if she's in the room, but she usually is. She's here selling books and things, and she's been with me for 30 years. And I called her and I said, come out right away. She said, what for? I said, it's really important. And she drove out to my townhouse that I owned in Florida, where I had accumulated 30 years or more worth of books and tapes and awards and photographs and furniture and clothing, everything you can possibly imagine in this place, and 20,000+ books. And I said to her, here's the key: get rid of everything, give it all away. Call my children if they want any of the furniture. Told them to come and get it. Give the books to hospitals and prisons and places where they can use them. Get rid of all the clothes, everything, and just, um, I'm leaving. I'm done. And I walked away from everything I had accumulated over a lifetime. Just walked away from it with a pair of Birkenstocks and the twist. And it was one of the most freeing moments of my life, detaching myself. From all of this stuff that I had accumulated, that I owned, or I should say owned me. And I went off to Maui. I had by this time slowed down on the running process and moved into something called yoga, which I now do every day. Bikram hot yoga, 90 minutes every day, because yoga teaches us what the Tao teaches us in Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life. It's that if you hold this book, which contains the complete Tao Te Ching in it, next to your heart when you feel even like you need help, you'll feel it. It's in there. The energy is in it. The words are that profound and that powerful. This is not something that endured for 2,500 years because it wasn't important. It was a great and important and powerful message. And I decided by the end of that year that on the 1st of January I was going to begin living each one of these 81 verses of the Tao. And I was going to take 4 to 4.5 days to meditate on it because you can read it. You can read one verse in less than a minute. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao is the opening line. And I would contemplate that. I would do yoga on it. I would practice it. I would breathe it. I would live it because I was working at doing what Lao Tzu offered us and told us to do, which is to trust in your own nature. Which is to find God not in a cathedral and not in a church or not in a mosque, but to find it in nature, to have an awareness that nature has much to teach us, that no storm can last forever. The Tao teaches us that you end all conflicts with love, all of them. The person of Tao, when you're done with your fighting, when you're done with your conflicts, when you're done with your anxiety, your hatred and your bitterness, the person of Tao returns with love. It's very interesting because just a few weeks ago, about a month ago now, I was in Tampa, Florida at a conference called I Can Do It. And my daughter Tracy, my oldest daughter who is now 40, she was born on the 1st of August, 1967. I told my mother, I said, can you believe it, mother? I said, I have a, I have a daughter who's 40. I just can't even get that. She said, "Excuse me," she said, "I have 3 sons on Medicare." I said, "That's a good point. I won't be bringing that up anymore." So my daughter Tracy was there with me in Tampa, and she— I had invited her to come there because she has started her own business. It's called Urban Junket, and she decided after years of being an executive with a company called Best Buy that she was done with that. I've always told her that you're never completely free You're never really free until you can work for yourself. When someone's telling you what time to come in, what to wear, where you should be, how you should do things, the freedom that you're really looking for isn't there. And I'm not talking to if everyone else thought that way. I'm only talking to you, each one of you. And you have to decide whether that's a place where you can or want to go. But she did finally. She took the risk and she started this company, and she did it all based on the kind of stuff that she's heard me talking about since she was I was 9 years old when I wrote Your Erroneous Zones in 1976. And she trusted and had a knowing that the right things, you know, would show up. As Patanjali said, when you're inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all of your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations. Your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new and a great and a wonderful world. Dormant forces, he said, dormant forces, forces that you thought were dead, come alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. And all you have to do is move into the world of spirit, live the four virtues. That's all you have to do. And as you begin to practice that and live this on a daily basis, the right people, the right events, the right money, the financing, it all begins to show up. Unless you're like some of you in here saying, yeah, but that doesn't apply to me, it's never been that way before. But That's for just a few minutes from the road down here. And so Tracy was there in the room, and now this was a few months ago. Her mother, Judy, my first wife, was there in the room, and it was the first time in 36 years that Tracy, her mother, and I were in the same room. Imagine. Now for me, that's not that big a deal, but imagine what that felt like for Tracy to have her mom and dad, because basically after her mother and I divorced, I started going into a place where I became recognizable and so on, and Tracy for 40 or 36 years has had to sort of pretend that she was the daughter of Wayne Dyer. Talking about me to her mom was something that she just had learned not to do because it upset her mom's much. Her mother was remarried for 27 years. Her new husband, or her second husband, passed away a few years back and was a wonderful man. But her mother still had this kind of residual hurt, pain, whatever, whatever, from divorce, which it's hard to escape that because divorce is such a tough thing for people, especially young people, children. So, um, Judy was sitting right there where that lady is sitting, and And I had the microphone and there were, I think, about 4,000 people in the room. Literally, you could hardly see the back of the room, it was so big. There's, what, 1,500 or so, 1,600 people in here. It was 3 times the size of this audience. And something possessed me to talk to Judy, who I hadn't seen in 25 years. I hadn't seen her, talked on the phone once or twice. I used to always call her on our anniversary, but she didn't like the humor there. She just— I took the microphone. Phone and I said to her, I said, and I can't believe how old she is. We went to high school together. She's like, she's 3 years from 70. I just couldn't believe that. I even said that to her. I said, geez, you got old. She said, I guess you're not looking in the mirror. I said, oh yeah, I just remember now why we got divorced. You were good at those kind of— anyway, we had a little banter going on. So I said to her in front of everyone, I said, Judy, I would like to say something to you in front of everyone. I said, you were a much better wife to me than I was a husband to you. And I would like to say in front of all of these people that I apologize to you for my lack of faithfulness, for the ways that I treated you in those days, if any of them caused you any pain. I said, what I've really learned is that true nobility is not about being better than anyone else. It's about being better than you used to be. And I think I'm better than I used to be on almost every criteria that caused us to be divorced. And I'm honored to have participated with you in bringing this beautiful young woman into the world. And I honor you and I love you. That's what I said. So that was— it was over. It was a warm moment. It was like— and it reminded me of what it teaches in the Tao, in one of the verses of the Tao, because I did that when I finished this book, when I finally I finished one full year of Living the Tao, the wisest book ever written. And I didn't know who I was going to dedicate this book to. It's my 31st book. I've done it for my children, my grandchildren, everybody I know, strangers on the street. Would you like to have a book dedicated to you? I got an answer. My father who walked out on us when I was just a baby, who I never saw, who spent 5 years of his life in prison, who never sent a penny in child support, who never even made a phone call. My father, your grandfather, who I've never met in my life, who caused me to live in an orphanage for 10 years, who caused my mother to struggle beyond anything a woman should have to struggle with. And Lao Tzu said, "You end all conflicts on love." For my father, Melvin Liledire, even though I've never known you, after thoroughly digesting the Tao, I finally get it. It is and always was All perfect. I love you. So that was a hard one, and that was dictated by Lao Tzu, as was virtually every single one of the essays I wrote on each of those 81 verses. It was, how can I live this? How can I practice this? How can I put it? And what Ariel and Liz set up here is that this book, I don't even feel that I wrote it, so I don't even take the credit for it. I don't even take the royalties anymore. Literally, I give everything away now. Everything. I've got enough of everything. Virtually 100% of everything that comes into me goes someplace else. Half of it, thanks. Half of it to the IRS. But it's just now the greatest joy that I find is in being able to live at that place. And living at that place of just giving and just offering and taking nothing and just surrendering and offering it back is, um, has been so incredibly magnificent for me that so much comes into my life now, so much more. I don't mean just like I'm making good money and things like that. I'm talking about amounts of financing and so on in such large proportions from— like, Your Erroneous Zones is the number one book in South Korea right now. That was a book I wrote in 1976. They sold 107,000 copies in the last 6 months, and I got a check for $83,000. Now How do you— what do you do with that? It isn't what do you do with the $83,000, it's what do you do with that kind of law of attraction working in your life because you're no longer attached to it. There's so many paradoxes in the Tao, there's so many. You can only achieve fulfillment when you achieve emptiness. You can only hear answers by silencing your mind. This is half of the Tao. You can only become rich By knowing already that you have enough. You all have to know that and not be consumed with more. If you say to the universe, give me, give me, give me, the universe's response back will be exactly the same. You're aligned with that. It will align and give you experiences that match your desire. It'll say, give me, give me, give me, and you'll constantly feel under pressure and never able to arrive. If on the other hand, your message to the universe is— now this is a total paradox. If your message is, how may I serve? How may I serve? Just teach me to serve. Teach me to be a better person. Teach me to be like you. Teach me to be like God. Just let me remember how to do that, how to do that, how to do that. The universe's response back to you, I'm telling you, I'm the guy you came to hear. I've got the mic. This is my experience in life. And I'm telling you, the universe's response back to you in spades will be, how may I serve you? How may I serve you? How may I serve you? That's how it works. And I opened up with what I was talking about when I opened up with this idea that when you go to the extreme on what I'm speaking about, when you go to the extreme and it's not something that you're doing so that, okay, God, notice this, watch me, I'm giving even more, look out, come on, where the hell is it? When's it coming? You know, it's like, I'm doing this because this is who I am. I don't not steal because stealing is against the law. Lao Tzu said anything you do because it's against the rules means you've left the Tao. You don't steal because stealing is not your nature. You don't lie because lying is no longer your nature. You are giving because kindness is your nature. It becomes your nature And then you don't want anymore, and the universe just keeps providing. You can only reach paradise by realizing that it's already within yourself. You can only reach paradise when you know it's already within you. That paradise is wherever I am. This is what I take wherever I go. I take this kind of a consciousness, this kind of a shift. And that year of 2006, from January 1st, I finished it on December 31st, 81 essays, each one ending with a section called "Do the Tao Now" so that you can go out and put this thing into practice in your life on a daily basis. And some of them were tough. And when they were tough, I said so in the essays. I said, if you think this one's tough for you, I had to read this verse 1,000 times and then 1,000 times more until I finally got it. And I keep looking over here at Joan Borzenko, who's sitting in the second row here, one of my dearest friends, the smartest woman in the world. That's what I've always said about Joan. But I just read The Soul's Compass. Thank you for sending it to me. And so much of what I'm— I see you nodding and your husband, I see you nodding because so much of it is in there in that Soul's Compass. What a beautiful Good job. That's really one great book. Thank you for writing that, The Soul's Compass. So I'm conscious of the time and I'm only into the introduction, but what I want to speak about for a few moments is what Lao Tzu has offered us with the Tao Te Ching and the Huahu Jing. What he's offered us is what to think. Think flexible, think soft. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Think small. Sages create big things by thinking small. Never think big. Think about what you can do in this moment. Be flexible. Live like water. Why is the ocean the most— the strongest force in the universe? Why is it the strongest force on the planet? Because it stays low. It stays low. It stays way down here. Well, this is a yoga posture. I love that. Yeah. And it stays low because all it knows that all of the rivers and all of the streams will come to it, ultimately will come to it. It's said that you can find your truth in nature. I've got to read this to you. This is from the Tao. A spider is a perfect creature of Tao. Its body is an elegant expression of its mind. It spins beautiful threads and its legs are exactly suited to create and walk its web. From its center, a spider radiates its world out with a spare economy. A spider's posture in regard to the Tao is to set up a pattern. Its mind determines this pattern. It realizes the flow of Tao and does nothing to interfere with it. It simply creates its pattern and waits for Tao to bring its sustenance. That which comes to it, it accepts. That which does not come to it is in no way any of its concern. Once its web is established, a spider does not think of expanding unnaturally. It does not make war upon its neighbors. It does not go for adventures in other countries. It does not try to fly to the moon. It does not build factories. On and on. It does not get concerned. It does not get concerned. With what its neighboring spiders are getting or not getting. It totally and completely has surrendered to the Tao, and whatever it brings it, it is happy with, and whatever doesn't come its way, it is happy with. There's a wonderful old, old painting— you art historians in here might know it— it's called The Three Tasters. And The Three Tasters is a drawing that was made in ancient China of a barrel filled with vinegar, and there are 3 people tasting the vinegar with a cup. The first one is Confucius and Buddha. These were all contemporaries, by the way, contemporaries living together at the same time on the same planet, and Lao Tzu. And Buddha takes a taste of it, and you can see that for him it is sour, because there are a lot of things that are sour in the world, and you have to really struggle and give up your desires and so on. So he's got this sour look on his face. As Confucius tastes it, it is bitter because Confucius believes that the world is a bitter place and we need a lot of rules. We need etiquette. We need ways to tell people how they should conduct themselves. So he's got this bitter look. And Lao Tzu has taken a cupful of vinegar and tasted it, and it is sweet. And he's smiling and sweet. Because Lao Tzu says that whatever comes your way is provided for, and it is all sweet if you process it that way. It's how you choose to process your world. One of the reasons that I've started writing children's books— got 3 of them now: Incredible You, Unstoppable Me, It's Not What You've Got. So Lao Tzu gave us a model in 81 verses, and it's not an accident that there's 81 verses in the Hua Hu Jing and the Tao Te Ching, and there's 18 verses in the Bhagavad Gita also being written at the same time. And 18 in Hebrew means what? I'm life. Life. 18. One infinite source. Infinite source wants. 8-1-1-8. 8 is a symbol of infinity. So in these 81 verses, he's offered that. But what he didn't do, and what I'm working on now in my heart And then, well, I'm sure that I'm writing a book about this. I probably am. And I'm calling it Excuses Be Gone, a look at how to change thoughts that are established and things that you hang on to for all of your life. How do you change lifetime ingrained thinking? Like those of you who've been overweight and struggled with weight your whole life, that's not a weight problem. It's a thought problem. Those of you who have struggled with addictions for a lifetime can end them by reconnecting to the place of well-being from which you came. But that's too— I don't know, it's too broad, it's too generic. You have to look at the ways that you have been thinking, especially when you've been thinking about, I can't attract into my life what I want. I can't have the right person in my life. I can't create the job that I would like to have. I can't do what I have a calling. I know I have a passion, about something, but I can't seem to bring it into my life. When you shift all of that and begin to ask yourself the question— there's 7 of them, I don't have time to go into all of them— but the first of these 7 questions is to look at a thought that you have and to say to yourself, is it true? Is the thought true? And you're going to find out that virtually every thought that you have doesn't pass the test of whether it's true or not. That is, does it pass the veracity test? The veracity test is, is it true 100% of the time? Let's say the excuse or the thought is, it's going to be very difficult for me to change. It's going to take a long time for me to change. Those are two of the most common reasons that we have. It's not been my luck. I've never had those kind of experiences before, and so on. But if you can just take, it's going to be difficult, it's going to take a long time, and you've got some kind of something in your life that you haven't been able to change, and you ask yourself the question, is it true? Is it really true 100% of the time that it's going to be difficult? You have to say, let's see, and that it's going to take a long time. It's not 100% sure. And if it's not 100% sure, that means there's some opening there for it not being true. And if there's an opening for it not being true, it's not true. Isn't it? If there's an opening for it not being true, it's not true. So, and if it's not true, the likelihood that it will take a short time and that it's going to be very easy is just as probable as it's going to take a long time and it's going to be difficult. So you begin to change that thought, and then you start saying what Byron Katie has taught me, which is to ask yourself the question, What would my life look like if I couldn't have the thought that it's going to be difficult for me to change? What if I couldn't have that thought? What would your life look like? Those of you who would like to create something in your life or overcome an addiction or lose the weight or whatever it is that you would like to have for yourself in your life, and you couldn't have the thought that it's going to be difficult and take a long time, what would your life look like? How would you feel? Just shout it out. How would How would you feel? Free. That's always the first word, free. What else? Happy, joyful, grateful. So now you have an option. There's a whole bunch of these, and all of them are on this like positive thing that we'd really like to have. Wouldn't we like to have happy, joyful, warm, free thoughts? To be free? And now you have this option, and you begin to examine this with every excuse you have in your life. And the option is, if I'm going to think a thought, and the thought that I'm going to think is not true, but it's going to make me overweight, unhappy, depressed, fearful, anxious, whatever it might be, and I have that choice, or I have the choice to think another thought which is or is not true, but it will bring me freedom, warmth, joy, gentleness, happy, gratitude, it will bring me that, why wouldn't I make that choice? Why would you choose to have a thought? I did a seminar in Maui. Was anybody here that was there? Were you in Maui? You were in Maui? Do you remember the woman that was, um, she was binging and purging, and I brought her— I asked permission, I bring you up. This is a woman who'd been binging and purging for 23 years. Can you imagine what her world was like and her body was like and so on? And she was tearful, and we looked at her skin. Her skin just looked like it was, it was almost like you could see right through it. She was there for one week. Well, she kept saying, I think I could do this if I could stay longer, but I can't stay longer because it's too expensive on Maui. So I gave her $1,000. I said, just see how this works? It's just amazing. And Maya came rushing up from the back with 10 $100 bills and plunked them in her hand, and she also gave $100 of her own. So she had $1,100. So now she had a place to stay for the next 4 or 5 days on Maui, and that excuse was gone. And for 7 solid days, this woman, for the first time in 23 years, did not binge and did not purge. Her body was aching inside, she was— but she didn't do it. And we brought 3 people up who I just felt wanted to quit smoking. And each one of them, as we went through each thought about how difficult it was going to be to quit smoking, something that they wanted to do but couldn't because of their addictive nature and blah, blah, blah, and all the excuses. And every time they would come up with an excuse, I would ask them the question, is that thought true? Are you sure it's true? And then as she would think about it, no, it's not true. So you're using a thought that's not true to continue to keep an addiction going. And as you begin to look at not just what to think differently, but how to think differently, and recognizing that your thoughts have energy. That's why I always bring Power Versus Force, and I always bring a case of these with me. David Hawkins, perhaps the most important and significant book I've read in 10 years. And it teaches us about what our thoughts can do in terms of strengthening and weakening us. It was a life-changing book for me. I encourage you to read it. The other one that I always bring is The Experience of God. I call this the bathroom book. Because I really believe that you have to replace low energy with high energy. If you put this on the stool in front of the toilet, myself, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Louise Hay, Bernie Siegel, Ram Dass, Scotty Peck, Joan Borisenko, and a group of us. The Experience of God. It's worth looking at. It's not how to find God, it's how to experience it. The final thing I'd like to say What I've been speaking about up till now, living the virtues, living them, putting them into practice. And when you do, the laws of the material world no longer apply. The healing that you're seeking, the removal of the struggle that you've had so much in your life, the lack of confidence to go after what you want, the awareness that whatever it is that you need is on its way. So you begin thinking like that. Instead of it'll never happen for me, because that's a thought that's not true. If it's not 100% true all the time, then it's not true. And if it's not true, you start changing your thoughts to what is true or what will work for you and have an expectation. So Lao Tzu, this book, the Tao Te Ching, to me has been life-transforming for me. Changing your thoughts is about examining the veracity of the thinking that you have and putting it into its proper place. If a thought is false, it is not worth having. Every thought that you have that is false will weaken you under kinesiology experimentation. You just have a thought that is false and notice that you get weak. Just, just, you can test yourself with that in Power Versus Force. It teaches you how. And the final thing is what I call moving, and I talked about it at the very beginning, moving from ambition to meaning in your life. The morning of your life was dedicated when you came out, when you took on that ego, when you began to believe that you are what you have and you are what you do and you are what other people think of you. And so you spent your life accumulating and achieving and getting other people to like you. And we were raised that way and we raised our children this way, on this idea that ambition is what's important, your goals are what are important, making money, putting away, saving, taking care of your family, all of these kinds of— these are the important things in your life. But in here, especially in the afternoon of your life, and it has nothing to do with chronology, it has to do with how you think in your life. And it can happen when you're 5, it can happen when you're 35, it generally happens in your early 30s. When you make this shift toward the afternoon of your life. And in the afternoon of your life, this is the time when meaning supplants ambition as the primary focus of your life. I intend to live my life on purpose. I think, Ariel, that's what's happening for you. I think that's what this conference is about. I think that's why you radiate such incredible love and energy going through chemo and the things that you're going through, it's because you're here on purpose, living from "How may I serve?" which is your meaning, rather than "What's in it for me?" And I think it's a great lesson for all of us to get to that place in your life. And Carl Jung had a wonderful observation I want to share with you. He said, "Thoroughly unprepared"— this is from "Stages of Life"— Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot have the afternoon of life— live, rather— we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning. For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what was true in the morning will at evening have become a lie. If you try to run your life when you have made the shift into, I'm going to live my life on purpose, on meaning, I'm going to live the virtues, this is what I'm going to do, this is what gives me a sense of purpose— it doesn't matter what you're doing or what business you're in, it just this is where I'm going to be, this is where my thoughts are, you're going to forget about yourself, like with John, and just say, this is what I have to do because it tells me in here I have to do. When you live that way, everything else will be provided and handled for you. And you get past that if you're trying to do that, but you're living according to the program of life's morning, which is ambition, getting ahead, Being concerned with other people. The ego says, "I am what I do." The Tao says, "Do little. Do nothing." The Tao does nothing and leaves nothing undone. That's what the Tao says. The ego says, "I am what I have." So you accumulate for a lifetime. Get as much stuff as you can. The Tao says, in the afternoon of your life, let go. Detach. Hang on to nothing. Don't let it own you. Let yourself be lived by the Tao rather than attempting to live it. Be lived by it. Do nothing. Leave nothing undone. The ego says, "I am my reputation. I am what other people think of me." The Tao says, "The only concern you have is to stay connected to God. What other people think of you is none of your business." Ego says, "I'm separate from everyone else." The Tao says, "We're all one." No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves. We're all branches on a tree called humanity. The ego says, "I am separate from God." The Tao says, "You are God. You must be like what you came from, and you came from a source that is perfect." perfect. To watch another amazing Wayne Dyer video, check it out right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. And the Tao doesn't teach you to think big. It thinks you— it teaches you to think small. Thinking big is a mistake according to the Tao, because when you think big, you can't get big things done. We can only do things in this moment.