Wayne Dyer: The Manifestation Secret Most People Ignore (The Real Way To Attract Miracles)
Wayne Dyer argues that real manifestation requires humility and spiritual alignment, not the selfish desire promoted in The Secret. He presents seven questions to dismantle limiting beliefs, using Dan Caro's story of a burn survivor who became a world-class drummer as proof that releasing excuses creates miraculous change.
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You've probably tried to change your bad habits and failed at least one time, and it's easy to blame your DNA or say change is just too hard. Dr. Wayne Dyer is here to prove that you can overcome a lifetime of negative thinking. He explains how your mind has the ability to change your reality and breaks down the science behind the biology of belief. You're going to learn how to stop being a hostage to your ego and start living a true purpose. A special thanks to Liz Dawn and Celebrate Your Life for partnering with us to release this video exclusively here on my YouTube channel. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Wow.
Good morning. My name is Wayne Dyer. I'm 68 years old, and I have sex almost every day. Thank you. Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday, almost on Wednesday. It's almost counts when you're 68. It's wonderful to be back. It's the first time here in this new facility, which is so beautiful, and to get this many people. Too bad. Get a better seat. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'll speak up. I thought I was talking to my kids there for a moment. Speaking of which, when I turned the age of the Beatles song, "Will You Still Want Me? Will You Still Love Me When I'm 64?" You know, when I first heard that song, I didn't even understand what it meant. I was in my early 20s and I thought, They really shouldn't even allow people to live that long, you know. Feed them a little Soylent Green and send them on their way, you know. But before you know it, it happens to you, or to me it did anyway. And on that day, that day, May 10th, 2004, I was speaking in in North Carolina, in Durham, North Carolina. And I have 8 children. One of them was with me that night, Skye, who's been singing on my PBS shows for the last 12 years. She's now 27. She was 15 when she started doing those with me. And we were at the hotel and a FedEx package arrived and there was a CD in it and a CD player and a note on the COVID of the package that said, "Play this song." So I played it and sure enough, there was the Beatles singing, you know, "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me when I'm 64?" And then there was a beautiful card which I've saved. I usually open up my talks with that, and I brought it here with me today. And it said, "Dad, inside of this birthday card is a very special message from God." And I thought I'd finally maybe made contact with these kids after all these years. "See you soon. Happy birthday." Smartass kids.
Yeah.
I have 6 daughters and 2 sons, and they keep me really grounded. My 2 favorite lines from my children, one was from Sarena, when my wife had decided to go away for 30 days and to leave me in charge. And I had to take care of all of these kids myself and get them to school. I didn't realize that they all eat 3 meals every single day. That was 20-some meals a day. So I hired a few extra people to help out. While she was gone. And she went away in something called silence, which meant I couldn't make any contact with her for 30 days other than through my meditations. And then I understood after about the second day why she went into silence. She went to a monastery to work on her own book. And it was early morning, about 6 o'clock in the morning. They were all gathered around the table and I kept raising my voice and telling them that they had to hurry. They just don't move in the morning, huh? Sit there and anything I would say, they would just ignore me like I wasn't there. I was trying to get their breakfast. I was making waffles for them at the toaster. It's a lot easier than all of this stuff that my wife was doing. And I would say, "Come on, let's go, get moving, come on, it's important, I'm an important person, I'm a prophet, you know, I get paid by the thought, I have to go walk the beach, I have things to do." Nothing, nothing, no movement. Finally I said, "Look, I'm going in the back, I'm going to get my clothes, when I get back out here I want you ready to get into the car." And Serena stands up, she was 10, maybe 11. She looked at me, put her hand on her hip, and said, "I wonder what all those people would think of Mr. Positive if they could see him here this morning, huh?" She looked at her sister and said, "Would you buy a book from someone who yells at a 10-year-old girl, huh?" I sort of slunk into the back room, and then about 3 days later, my other daughter, Summer, they were sitting at the same table, and it was probably the best line I've ever heard come out of any of my children, because I oftentimes would follow them around in those days with a notepad and say, "Come on, say something stupid. You know, I need some material." And Summer was, uh, looked at her sister Serena sitting next to her. Serena was 11, Summer was 13. And she just looked at her and said, "If you didn't have any feet, would you wear shoes?" And Serena, who can hardly stand anybody at 6 o'clock in the morning, looked at her and said, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Don't even speak to me. What are you talking about? If I didn't have any feet, would I wear shoes? Of course not." Somebody said, "Don't yell at me, I was just wondering why you're wearing that bra." So I got it up and wrote it down. That's too good. Anyway, hmm. Well, I don't know about you, and I know this is a red state and there are green states and blue states and all of those, but I believe in purple states, and purple is a combination of red and blue. And it doesn't matter who you were voting for or what the politics of all of this has been going on. It's been going on for so long. I had a full head of hair when that campaign started. But it's just a very hopeful time, isn't it? I mean, yeah. And whoever you were for, whatever your feelings, it's not just here in the United States that it's a hopeful time. I think it's a hopeful time for beginning to really understand that what the Native Americans always said, that no tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves. And that we are all branches on a tree called humanity. And this concept and idea that we have to have enemies and we have to fight among ourselves, whether we're having religious differences or cultural differences or racial differences, that The fact that all of us, all of us are one, and that it isn't just a slogan and something that we say at a conference like this. It is a time for us to take this planet that is in peril, not just from things like global warming, but from our beliefs. I was just listening to my friend David Hawkins, who lives not far from here in Sedona, saying that in all of recorded history, in the entire history of humanity and everything that's been written from the time there were writings on caves and hieroglyphics, that mankind has been at war for 93% of that time. 93% of our time as human beings, we still haven't figured out how to get along, how to live together in peace. I just think that it's a real possibility for all of us now. So hold that vision. It's an important vision for all of us. Yeah. Thank you. There is something that I refer to as a calling, and it is something that's sort of buried deep inside of us. It's a few years back, I wrote a book for my teenage children. I had 5 of them as teenagers at one time. Yeah. And the book's called "10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace." And the second— the reason I wrote this was that I wanted my children after I'm gone to, if they ever wanted to know what I thought of as the most important ideas that I had ever encountered, I wanted to put them in this little collection here. And the second one of these secrets was something that you've probably heard me say if you've listened to me over the years or if you've watched public television. And it's called— it was— I got it from one of the great, great teachers that ever walked on this earth. His name was Leo Tolstoy. He was considered to be the father of Russia. In 1905, this was the most famous man on the planet. This was before television, before radio. He was one of the real great, great writers of our time, but he didn't just write great things like War and Peace. He wrote The Kingdom of Heaven is Within, a spiritual text for— and he was speaking from a position of having an awareness of the power of great spiritual teachers, especially Jesus Christ. In a country that was run by czars and didn't really have a whole lot of religious tolerance. And he wrote a little short story, 167 pages, so it's not that little, called The Death of Ivan Ilyich. And Ivan Ilyich was a judge who lived in Moscow, and he hated everything about him, about his life. He blamed his wife for where he was, what his conditions of his life were. He had wanted to be something else in his life, and instead, because of the pressures that he felt were imposed upon him, he went to school and studied law and became a judge, went back and forth every day, but didn't like anything about his life. And if you remember the title of the story, you know the ending. The death of Ivan Ilyich, and you kind of keep waiting for that. And in the very last page, he is lying on his deathbed, and he looks up at his wife who is holding his hand. And this is a woman he despised and blamed for the conditions of his life, especially his inner conditions. And the last words he said to her as he died were, "What if What if my whole life has been wrong? And he died. I was in the Navy at that time. I was 19 years old. I was on my way to Japan across the Pacific Ocean, and I took out a notepad and I wrote a little note to myself, and it said, "Dear Wayne, don't die." with your music still in you. One of the signature moments in my life, um, when I started a journal, started writing down the really powerful ideas, wrote about them and practiced them and lived them. But there is something, something inside each and every one of us. In India, they call it a dharma. The dharma is really a— it's like there's a pull, there's a purpose to your life. And each and every one of us, all of us who originated from the same place and will return to the same place— 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 came and to know it for the first time. He was talking about death. I'm talking about getting to that place without having to die. What we call dying while we're alive, dying to the ego. To the part of us that believes in this thing that we call— Muktananda called it the false self. The part of us that becomes aware that we are something other than what we really were intended to be, what we came here to do, and what we showed up here for. The first 9 months of your life, from your conception until your birth, you were in a state of complete surrender. There was nothing to do. Everything was handled for you. Whatever it was that handled it, whether you call it God or Spirit or the Tao or Consciousness, the Divine Mind, whatever it is, it does nothing, and yet it leaves nothing undone. And there's this complete surrendering process. We have no other choice. We show up here from— in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that all being comes from non-being. Jesus put it the same way. He said it's the spirit that gives life. The flesh counts for nothing. Quantum physics teaches us one thing, if nothing else, for certain. That particles themselves do not come from particles, that there is something in each and every one of us that is formless, that is boundaryless, that has no beginning, that has no end. It's eternal. And it is from that that we emerged in some mysterious fashion, in one split second. From non-being to being, from non-particle to particle. And in that split second, everything that you needed for this physical journey was handled for you. And it's the biggest, most incredible miracle that any of us can ever witness, isn't it? And when you contemplate it and think about it, you try to process it, and it's just beyond anything that our meager intellect can handle. I was at the birth of 6 of those children, watched that miracle unfold, and saw that these children not only were a great mystery, but they came here with personalities already intact the moment that they were born. And any of you mothers out there who've had more than one child know exactly what I'm speaking about. Some of them sleep through the night, some of them stick their tongue out at you the first second they see you, and And when they're 18 and they come home, they do the same damn thing, you know. And this incredible mystery, this place called spirit, is, is something that handles everything for us without doing anything. And the moment that we are born, this beautiful little baby comes out and we hold it after we take the the mucus out and we cut the little cord and do all the little wiping off and hold this little baby and we look at it and we say, great work, God.
Thank you.
We'll take over from here. And that was the birth of your false self. This is the time when we take over and we begin to edge God out of the picture and take it over ourselves. Edge God out. E-G-O. We take on this thing called an ego and it becomes our identification. And all of the great spiritual teachers, whoever they may be, teach us the same thing, that this is not the authentic self. This ego of ours, we begin to believe something that has nothing to do with Spirit, that perfection from which we originated, which allowed us to become this perfect little creation. It's not too great a stretch for me to imply that if everything that we needed for this physical journey was handled in that moment of our going from non-being to being, that everything for the rest of the journey was in there as well. If we would have just let it be. There go the Beatles again. Let it be, let it be. There will come an answer. Let it be. But we don't. We start teaching ourselves and our children that who we are is not this divine, perfect creation that knows exactly what to do and what to be. It's already been taken care of. It's already been handled. Just like everything else on this planet has a dharma—every spider, every otter, every flower. Nobody has to interfere with it. Nobody has to tell it what to be or how to do what it is. It just is. It just is. But we start interfering. And as we interfere, we take on this false self. And this false self says that who I am is what I have. So we begin to become obsessed by our possessions, and we train our children and ourselves to believe that who I am is what I possess and what I own. And as we take on this belief system that I am what I own, it becomes the very thing that takes us away from our spirit. Because the ego says, "You are what you have." The Tao says, "Let go of everything you have. Just let it go. You don't need to own anything." And then we believe also that this false self of ours believes that we are what we do and what we accomplish. And so we spend a big hunk of our life preparing ourselves to achieve, to get ahead of the other guy, to get the good grades, to make more money, to be in competition, to evaluate our worth as human beings on the basis of how we stack up to others and how we achieve. The ego says you are what you do. In the Tao, it teaches us to do nothing, to do less, that more is less and less is more, and to allow yourself to, to be guided and to know that there's a divine organizing intelligence in this universe, and you can let it— Lao Tzu put it this way, he said, "Let yourself be lived by it." Let yourself be lived by it. He said, "You're doing nothing, you're just being done." Let yourself be done, just like you did in the first 9 months. You're doing nothing, you're just being done. And at 68, when I look in the mirror, I can see the same thing happening. I'm just being done. Just try to stop your heart from beating or your fingernails from growing. I used to say, or your hair from growing, but I've mastered that one. And then this false self of ours, this ego, tells us that not only are you what you have and what you do, But you are what other people think of you. You're your reputation. And again, we go off on this journey of attempting to get everybody that we encounter to accept the fact that if you like me, then I'm a better person. And so we struggle with things like peer approval and getting other people to like us and the evaluating ourselves on the basis of how many awards we win, and so on. And then this false self also tells us that we're separate from everybody else, that we're separate from what's missing in our life. And the most egregious error of this false self is that it teaches us that we are separate from God, that God is something external to ourselves, something that we, um, we pray to and we ask for divine guidance from. And we treat this thing that we call God like a cosmic bellboy, asking it for things when we get into trouble and promising to behave. It'll, it'll only deliver for us now. As if this God was a withholding God and had the power to heal you or to offer you the abundance that is missing in your life, but it's holding it back so that you'll contribute more to whatever organizations believe they represent God. And it's, again, it's a false image. And what happened for me At the age of 65, the day after I turned 65, 3 years ago, is that I was called to do something and live something that I had never even imagined could happen. On the 11th of May, 2005, I called my secretary who is here with me today. She's been with me for 32 years. Her name is Maya. She's in the back. And I called her and I said to her, and I don't know, I didn't know this the day before. I said, I would like you to take everything that I have in my townhouse, which was my office where I did all of my writing for the previous 25 years. Which had over 20,000 books in there and all kinds of equipment of all kinds and awards that were on the walls and photographs and furniture and electronic equipment and tax records and just whatever you accumulate in a writing space over a quarter of a century. And I told her, as I handed her the key to this place, I said, "I want you to get rid of it all." She said, "Well, tell me which part you want to save." And I said, "I don't want to save anything. I want it all to be gone." And she said, "And then when it's empty, what would you like me to do with this place?" I said, "We'll sell it or give it away." And that night someone called about an inquiry about purchasing this place, which was near a hospital in Boca Raton, who needed to be close to a hospital because of an injury he had received. And he said he would really like to have one of these places, which were very, very hard to come by. And he made an offer. Maya said, well, it's "Uh, it's about $50,000 less than what we can get for it." I said, "Let them have it, and then when you sell it, give the proceeds to my ex-wife." And I left with no clothes, no shoes. Everything that was in there was gone. And I was called to Maui. Where I live. And, and I was called by a man who lived 2,500 years ago in the warring states of China, part of that 93% of when we were still at war with each other. Villages fighting villages, countries fighting countries, people conquering each other. Enslaving each other. And this man who lived at that time, his name was Lao Tzu, which in Chinese means old man, and asked me to, in my meditations that kept coming up over and over again, to immerse myself into the, uh, this ancient book called the Tao Te Ching. T-A-O-T-E-C-H-I-N-G. T-A-O, Tao, means the great way. T-E in ancient Chinese means the virtues of. Ching means book. So the book of living the virtues of the great way. 81 verses. Some call it the wisest book ever written. It came down to us with over 14,000 different translations in the last 2,500 years. Modern, ancient, all the different languages. 14,000 different interpretations of this classic text. That he jotted down. In fact, he didn't even write it. He dictated it to the gatekeeper as he got on his oxen, legend tells us. And he came to the gate where he said, "I can no longer live amongst these warring states and these warring peoples. I am a man of peace." And the gatekeeper wouldn't let him leave, legend tells us, unless he told him in words the great wisdom that he had been telling people who had been coming to him for many, many, many years, including a man named Confucius who was 40 years his junior, who came to him for advice. He was a contemporary of Buddha, just a little ways away from there. And Socrates and Zoroaster and some of the greatest spiritual teachers who all walked among us in that 5th century before Christ. Someone sent me a book when I was working on this called Lao Tzu and Jesus. And on the left-hand side of the page were the teachings of Jesus, and on the right side were the teachings of Lao Tzu. Now I'm not saying that Jesus was, uh, copying or plagiarizing since he came 500 years later, but I know there's no time, so all of that is meaningless. But they're almost identical because the great spiritual teachers who walked among us only have one message for us. And in these 81 verses which you could read in about an hour, but you can study for a lifetime. I had a teacher in India, uh, back in the '80s. His name was Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Nisargadatta had a book written about him by his devotees, just like Lao Tzu did. It was called I Am That. And I remember him saying to us that you don't have to read this book. He said, "Just carry it with you and the wisdom from the pages will come to you because there's energy in everything. You don't even have to look into it if you don't want to. And if you need to, you'll be guided to." And now that was a while back. I was in my early 40s. And I just thought, well, this is just another one of those crazy gurus over there in India. And I didn't understand that until I became familiar with some of Hawkins' work on energy. And so I created my own translation of the Tao from bringing them with me and going through the ones that seemed to be most relevant, the ones that were most understandable. And we put it into a paperback with an affirmation next to each one of them. And I now understand what he meant, and I do this now. I carry it with me wherever I go, the entire Tao, and it always guides me. And you are going to get a free copy of this if you can catch it. Can you? That is precious. Stand up. And it's all yours, sweetheart. God bless you. Enjoy it. Carry it with you. The Tao has impeccable wisdom in it. The opening line of the Tao says, the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. The minute that you put a label on it, you have now divided it into two. You've got thing and you've got what you're calling it. And when you try to make two-ness out of oneness, you've lost it. It just is what it is. It does nothing. God does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. And God and the Tao, in my estimation, are synonymous. It is that which allows all things to come into being, which has no form. It is who you are right now, sitting here processing this in your bodies. But the part of you that's processing it has no body, has no form, has no beginning, has no end. And there you are, this huge paradox in a body that began and ends, is going to stop someday. All that materializes dematerializes, and there's a part of you in there watching, listening, observing that has none of that. You're a walking, breathing paradox. Like everything in the world of the 10,000 things, which is what Lao Tzu called the material world. And so I was called to it, and I decided that I was going to take an entire year of my life, and in this year, I was not just going to write about the Tao, I was going to experience it. I was going to live it, each of the 81 verses. And I called my publicist and my publisher and all of those people who schedule me and do things to me, direct me here and there, and told them that I was taking the year of 2006 to be essentially free of that. And there are 81 verses, and if you take 365 days and you divide it by 81, it comes up to about 4.5. So for 4.5 days, I had the opportunity to experience Verse 1 of the Tao, what it meant, meditating on it, practicing it wherever I could go, living it, memorizing it, constantly referring to it, taking notes on it, talking about it, but more than anything, attempting to live it and to practice it. And this was a calling. This was a calling that said, Wayne, you have music to play. And just because you're 65 years old, or 66 then, doesn't mean anything because there is no time. And so, uh, When you read the Tao, Lao Tzu's great tome on eternal wisdom, so much of it is paradoxical. So much of it doesn't make sense to our intellect. So much of it we want to reject, particularly those of us, all of us in this room who live here in the West. This idea that you can get more by doing less. That you can become strong by becoming weak, that you can become big by thinking small. And it wasn't until at the end of each one of those 4.5 days when there was a— would come a time when I wouldn't even know if I had it yet. Then I would wake up at 3 o'clock or so in the morning and I would meditate on it, and on that half day that I had, I would write my interpretation, my essay about how to do the Tao now, how to live it. And we made a public television special about it. They allowed us to broadcast it all over the country in prime time. Imagine the calling. Imagine the power, the feeling of being able to make a huge impact in the world. By having something written 2,500 years ago being broadcast on national television night after night after night in city after city after city, raising money for a wonderful cause like public television. It was an honor beyond anything I can describe to you. And every time it would air, I could see— I can— I could see people being touched by it. We called it Change Your Thoughts. Change Your Life, and there's 81 essays in it. It's a little heavy to carry with you, but my beautiful friend, Saeeda, it's so nice to see you. Do you have a copy of this? Now you do. Thank you. Enjoy it. God bless you. Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life. And when I finished that year and I finished that book and I did the public television special, and I lived those 81 verses, what I realized is that it taught me what to think. I learned what to think. I learned— see, what the Tao teaches us is that we all have a nature. Listen to Lao Tzu. He says every human being has an essential nature. That is perfect and faultless. But after years of immersion in the world, we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature. I would suggest that all of us who've immersed ourselves in this world have taken on a counterfeit nature, what I just described in the opening few moments. This ego, this part of us that really believes that my essence and my nature is about what I have, what I do, what other people think of me, and my separation from each other and from God. That's the story of the ego. This counterfeit nature, if we can transcend it, what I learned to think was he said, look at nature. You'll find God in nature. So in the 81 verses of the Tao, 31 of those verses contain references to water. To just be like water. And what is water like? It is the softest substance on the planet, and yet it is the strongest. If you take a rock, the hardest substance you can find, you can take titanium and just take a lump of it there and just let water run over it, patiently running over it. Eventually, whatever that hard thing is, it will disappear. And water, if you want to get a hold of it, if you want to experience water, if you reach in and grab a handful of it, and the tighter you squeeze, the less you get. But if you let go and relax and allow and do nothing, you'll understand water. And if you look at the sea, the sea is the lowest— we call it sea level, and it is the lowest place on the planet. And all of the rivers and all of the streams, wherever you see it, they're all competing and fight, whatever they're doing, but the sea stays low. And in so doing, it allows all of this to come to it. Practice, the Tao says, radical humility. Stay low. Let your ego go. Let it come to you, and miracles can happen for you. In the Tao, it says that a journey of a thousand miles Begins with what? A single step. It says, "Don't think big. Great sages," says the Tao, "accomplish great things by thinking small." I just celebrated my 22nd year of sobriety. Thank you. And I want to tell you, that's big, especially if you had 22 years before that in which you drank every day. Not to drunkenness, just every day. And when the day came, when the time came, when the quantum moment came for me to let it go, I didn't do it by thinking big and saying, I'm going to not drink now for the next 22 years. That would have— I would have had to open a beer to contemplate that. But I accomplished great thing like that by thinking small, by thinking small. And so I learned what to think. And then that year was complete and I studied it and wrote about it and felt its presence. It excited me, this thing called the Tao. And I had written, I taught at a university for years, and I even taught courses in various different philosophies and taught about the Tao, but I'd never understood the symmetry, the beauty, how compelling the simplicity of this great wisdom if you begin to apply it. You begin to see and find your own essential nature. And your own essential nature is just like all of other nature. You're a part of nature. And yet what we have done is ignored our nature so frequently. Our nature has nothing to do with violence. It has nothing to do with weapons. It has nothing to do with killing. It has nothing to do with enemies. These are all constructs of the ego, of the false self. We come from a place of perfection, a place of kindness, a place of love, creation. Learn to think like God thinks. That's what Einstein said when they asked him about quantum physics. They said his observation was, he said, I'd He said to me, he said that they're just details. He said, all I want to do is learn to think like God thinks. How does, how does the source from which all things originate, to which all things return, how does it think? How does it act? That's what Lao Tzu meant when he said we have an essential nature. And these virtues inside of the of our essential nature are nothing more— there's 4 of them— they're nothing more than reverence for all of life. If you can live that reverence for all of life, sincerity, which manifests itself as honesty, just simple honesty, not that you don't steal, but the kind of honesty in which you are able to relate to and reflect who you are with everyone that you meet from a place of internal integrity. That this is who I am. This is how I dress. This is how I live. This is what I think. Gentleness is the third of these virtues in the TE in the Tao Te Ching. Simple gentleness which manifests itself as kindness, And finally, service, which is nothing more than just reaching out and serving others. And in the unknown teachings of Lao Tzu called the Huahuqing, I'm going to read something to you that is one of the most impactful things that I've ever heard in my life. And I'd like you to really think about it big time. Many of you know about something that raged across the country a year or so ago called The Secret. And it had some great lessons in it about the power of our thoughts to align with the thoughts of God, and in doing so, to be able to manifest and attract into our lives what we would like. And I was asked to be a part of that, and I turned it down because I think they missed something. They missed what I'm about to share with you. In fact, yesterday, yesterday, for the very first time, I was able to preview something that I undertook this summer at the age of 68. When I was asked if I would do a film, a movie, a movie for movie theaters, not a talking heads movie, not a movie which I'm just interviewed and talking like I'm doing now, but an actual film with real people in it, 92 of them to be exact, starring Portia de Rossi, who is Ellen DeGeneres' spouse. And I had the great honor on the 16th of August this year when they both asked me in their quiet, cutest way you've ever seen at Ellen's home if I would marry them. And I did. Yeah. And I— we were in the midst of filming this movie called Ambition to Meaning. I saw it yesterday, the first rough cut for the whole thing, and watched it with Maya in my room here at the hotel. Maya was sobbing and couldn't contain her enthusiasm. It just— it absolutely blew me away. You'll be able to see it in January. It's a little over 2 hours and it's a drama. And it takes what I think was missing from The Secret and puts it into 3 concurrent running stories and teaches people that this idea of aligning ourselves with our spirit, with God, is not about what's in it for us. It's not about saying, "I want this," or, "I want that." And it's not about selfishness, and it's not about attracting into your life more of the stuff of the ego. It's about something very different. And this is how Lao Tzu put it in the oral teachings of the 81 verses of the Tao Te Ching. If you wish to become a divine immortal angel, then restore the angelic qualities of your being through virtue and service. This is the only way to gain the attention of the immortals who teach the methods of energy enhancement and integration that are necessary to reach the divine realm. If you want to reach the divine realm, if you want to know God, not about God, if you want to experience the opportunity to think like the source, like the Tao, like God thinks, and have all that is possible to come into your life come into it, then listen on. These angelic teachers, this energy, this spiritual force, this guidance, these angels, whatever you want to call that guidance that comes to us from beyond, these angelic teachers that you seek out cannot be sought out. It is they who seek out the students. Do I ever know that to be true, especially after giving up everything that I owned, everything, and letting it all go and immersing myself for a year of my life in this process. When you succeed in connecting your energy with the divine realm through high awareness and the practice of undiscriminating virtue, the transmission of the ultimate subtle truths will follow. This is the path that all angels take to the divine realm. This is the path. The mystical techniques for achieving immortality, that is, the ability to manifest and attract into your life at any moment anything at all that you would desire, are revealed only to those who have dissolved all ties to the gross worldly realm of duality, conflict, and dogma. You have to dissolve your ties to this false self and the world that perpetuates it. As long as your shallow worldly ambitions exist, the door will not open. And that's what I think The Secret missed. And that's what we tried to do in Ambition to Meaning. It's to get to that te in the Tao Te Ching, to get to that place where you live and practice the virtues that I just described: reverence for all of life, just simple, never ever, not only not killing other things, including animals and even plants and each other, but in not even judging each other. Patanjali, another great teacher from India 3 centuries before Christ, said that when you are steadfast— steadfast means you never slip— when you are steadfast in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed towards yourself and others, that all living creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence. Such was the nature of Saint Francis, of Jesus of Nazareth, of Lao Tzu, of Buddha. You are steadfast, you never slip in your abstention of thoughts of harm directed towards yourself and others, that all living Even creatures will cease to feel fear in your presence. There are people who, when they are in the presence of wild animals, they become tame. Babies stop crying. You see a person like that walk into the room and the energy of the room changes. And you feel comfortable and you feel safe and you get a kundalini running up and down your back of just like having a warm shower running inside of you. Such is the nature of these people, and such is the nature of the source from which you originated and to which you will return. In A Course in Miracles, there's a line that Jesus says— for those who believe that it was Jesus, and many do— Whoever it was, Jesus says, if you want to be like me, knowing that we are alike, I will help you. If you want to be different than me, I will wait until you change your mind, and you will change your mind. You may have to die to do it, but you will change your mind because that's the place from which we originated that T.S. Eliot spoke about, where you'll come to know it for the first time. When you live those simple virtues of reverence for all of life, always not— never judging others, natural sincerity, just a simple Honesty, this is who I am. Gentleness, which is just always extending kindness and service. It's dissolving your ties to the gross worldly realm, just letting go of that. And one of the best ways to do it is to want less, to expect nothing for yourself. And anything that does come to you, to just let it flow, to give it away. And the more of that that you do, the more you act like God acts. The great poet Hafiz, the Persian poet from the 13th century, said, "Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, "Thank you. You owe me." Just think what a love like that can do. It lights up the whole world. And there's such a mystery in that that we attempted to convey in this film. And I'm still so taken by the incredible acting job and the directors and all of the people who participated in this project of creating a film, a movie, an opportunity for people to finally see that it is through these virtues that the doors begin to open into your life and abundance, I'm telling you, I would urge you to not pay attention to all of the stuff on CNBC, which is all of the financial disaster possibilities and checking your stock market and checking your 401s and listening to the horror stories of all of the things and the collapse, the imminent collapse of our entire— you don't need any of this. Where do you think you're going? You came from nowhere. N-O-W-H-E-R-E. That's where you came from, nowhere. Where do you think you're headed? You went from nowhere to now here in a split second, and it's the same thing. N-O-W-H-E-R-E. It's just a little question of spacing. Nowhere. Now here. Here we are in now here. Where do you think your next step is? Nowhere. You don't need a 401. You don't need to be consumed with all of this stuff about money. This is, you know, when we did this thing on ambition to meaning, I had a real sense as I listened to the results of the election. That we can, as a people, we can also move from ambition to meaning, as a people, not just in our own lives. Because in the morning of our lives, you know, there's a line from Carl Jung in The Stages of Life, which is really what we opened this film with. He says, "Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life." Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that the truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we said, he said, we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning. For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. If you try to run the, the time of your life when you are in the phase of meaning rather than ambition, based upon the program of what you taught— were taught in the morning about ambition and about ego, you're going to be living a lie. So Jung, I mean, he speaks to us. Let me read it to you again in the light here. Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Unprepared into the afternoon of life is the time in your life when you shift from ambition and ego development to meaning. Worse still, he said, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas that we learned in the morning will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. If you're trying, if you're trying to find meaning and purpose and fulfillment and joy and peace and happiness in the afternoon of your life, if you're trying to have that and to have that for other people and to want it for others even more than you want it for yourself, you can't do that according to the program of the ego. You can't do that. The door will not open as long as you're connected to that. The doors begin to open as you lose your identity with this false self, as you let it go. As they say in the recovery movement, as we let go and we— real loud— what? Let God. As we let go and let God, which is what you did in the first 9 months. You were on your way, and then we had to got out. 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 To learn more about us, just click the link below and visit celebrateyourlife.com. So now we get to the afternoon of our life, and as I learned, I learned what, I learned what to think. But you know what? I had another calling last year, and I just spent up until about 2 and a half weeks ago writing every single day from the 1st of February. In a new book that'll be out next April or May. It's called Excuses Be Gone. And excuses are really the explanations that we have for why our life isn't working the way we want it to work. There are explanations. Again, I'm going back to we want to learn to think like God thinks, And God needs no excuses for anything. So what the Tao taught me and what Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life— what it taught me was what to think. But over and over again, I kept hearing, especially after doing the PBS tours and so on, the idea that I know what to think. I know how to think soft. I know how to think kindness. I know how to think peace. What I don't know how to do is to change around the patterns that I have for thinking the way that I've been thinking for an entire lifetime. That here I am now in my 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s, whatever it might be, and I have a lifetime of thinking a certain way. And if I could overcome that and learn to change that, like how to change lifetime thinking habits. "Habits rule the unreflecting herd," said William Wordsworth. "Habits rule the unreflecting herd." Habitual thinking, a way of thinking that keeps me trapped. In— even if I know what to think, I don't know how to stop this incessant, habitual way of looking at my world from a position of shortages, from a position of lack. And so I listened again and had another calling, and I read 3 books. I'm going to just briefly share them with you. One of them was a book, um, called The Biology of Belief and, um, Unleashing the Power of Consciousness. It's by a man named Bruce Lipton, PhD. Yeah. And this book was a life changer for me, because here's what it taught me. It taught me that the biggest excuse that we have for why we are the way we are is this thing called our DNA. Like, I mean, you see people interviewed on TV and they'll say, "Well, you know, I can change my habits and I can change this and all that, but I sure as hell can't change my DNA." And then someone will say, "Well, that's absolutely right." And you'll hear people agreeing with that. And it's pretty much a system of thinking in which we say that our bodies and these little particles that are deep inside our DNA structures are given to us, they're handed to us at the moment of our conception, they're not changeable, and I can't help it. I mean, that's why I reached over and grabbed you where I shouldn't have. It wasn't me, it was my hand. And this hand of mine, it doesn't know, it just went for your breast and I didn't mean to. I mean, it was just, you know, it's in my DNA. Nay, you can't blame me for my hand doing these kinds of things. You can't. And we use this kind of stuff over and over again. All right, so what I learned from, uh, from Bruce, who happens to be sitting right over here in the front row— I'd like him to stand up right there. He's influential in my life. Bruce Lipton. Brilliant. Thanks, Bruce. You honor me by being here. Instrumental In teaching me, he's got one little study. Let me just share it with you. I'm sure I brought it. Okay? So this will just give you an idea. And I think you're speaking, you said, in a tiny little room, in a phone booth someplace over in Scottsdale. But now he's speaking here a little bit later this morning. And this is just one little study that I picked out and I copied it to read to you this morning. It's a Baylor School of Medicine study published in 2002. In the New England Journal of Medicine. The lead author of the study, Dr. Bruce Moseley, knew that knee surgery— now knee, simple thing like knee surgery— helped his patients, and that all good surgeons know that there's no placebo effect in surgery. I mean, how can there be a placebo effect in surgery, right? But Moseley was trying to figure out which part of the surgery was giving his patients relief. The patients in this study were divided into 3 groups. Moseley shaved the damaged cartilage in the knee of one group. For another group, he flushed out the knee joint, removing material thought to be causing the inflammatory effect. Both of these constitute standard treatments for arthritic knees. The third group got fake surgery. I can't wait to go to this guy for a doctor, right? So the patient was sedated. Mosley made 3 standard incisions and then talked and acted just as he would have during a real surgery. He even splashed salt water to simulate the sound of the knee washing procedure. After 40 minutes, Mosley sewed up the incisions as if he had done the surgery. All 3 groups were prescribed the same post-operative care, which included an exercise program. The results were shocking. Yes, the groups who received surgery, as expected, improved. But the placebo group improved just as much as the other two groups. Despite the fact that there are 650,000 surgeries yearly for arthritic knees at a cost of about $5,000— this is a little old, probably more like $15,000— The results were clear to Moseley. My skill as a surgeon had no benefit on these patients. The entire benefit of the surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee was the placebo effect. Television news programs graphically illustrated the stunning results. Footage showed members of the placebo group walking and playing basketball, in short, doing things they reported they could not do before their quote-unquote surgery. The placebo patients didn't find out for 2 years that they had gotten fake surgery. One member of the placebo group, uh, Tim Perez, who had to walk with a cane before the surgery, is now able to play basketball with his grandchildren. He summed up the theme of this book when he told the Discovery Health Channel, in this world Anything is possible when you put your mind to it. I know that your mind can do miracles. That's from The Biology of Belief. In the invisibleness within us that we have the capacity to overcome even such things. And if you hear Bruce and read his book, which I recommend you do, uh, you'll discover that there is something called the internal environment and the way that we process events through our conscious and our subconscious minds that can in fact alter and shift. Now what this did for me is it gave me something called hope. It gave me something internally that says, if I get congestion in my chest, if I get heart palpitations, If I get a sore knee, if whatever it is that I can begin— and this is what Excuses Be Gone is about— you can begin to think in terms of awareness. Thinking with awareness. What is thinking with awareness? Awareness, thinking, and ego are not compatible. They cannot exist or coexist together. Awareness thinking is when you think from your highest self, from the place that you originated from, from the God within you. When you begin to think like God thinks. One of the words that Jesus said in the New Testament was, "With God, all things are possible." Now, what does that leave out? What does all things are possible leave out? No thing. Nothing. It leaves out nothing. When you begin to think from this level up here, the level of God consciousness, the level of spirit, the level of the Tao, when you— whatever it is that comes into your life, when you begin to think in terms of not only aligning yourself with this kind of thinking that all things are possible, and you just change that habit, the habit of, "I've got an excuse, a built-in excuse, and the built-in excuse is it's my biology. I just simply can't help my biology." But your biology comes from your beliefs just as much as it comes from your inheritance. And and knowing that you can change it. That was the first book. The second book that I read, I have here with me also, and it's called— oh, let's give one of these away. Does your mom have this? Has she read The Biology of Belief? Well, I would like to give that to her. Okay, I'd like her to know that all things are possible. Okay, um, Second book I read before I wrote this book, which was given to me by my friend Tiffany on Maui. She brought it over one day and just said, "I think you'll read it. It's about something called memes. I don't know what they are, but I know you'll like it because you like shit like that." Those were her words. I would never say that, but those were her words. So, I just looked at it, called Virus of the Mind by Richard Brody, another life-changing book. We have them here. It's basically what Virus of the Mind says, it tells us what viruses are. So if you think about a virus, a virus has 3 purposes. The first purpose of a virus in your body and in your computer, for example, is to duplicate itself as much as it possibly can. Just to duplicate. It makes a copy of itself over and over and over again. It doesn't care who it does it to. It doesn't have any vision about whether it's right or wrong, should or shouldn't be happening. It is just something that you get a virus, you know that you— you know, especially if you get one in your computer, you know you got a problem because it's just going to make a copy, then another copy, then another, and it just keeps doing that. That's how viruses work. Same thing in your body. And you can give it antibiotics all day and all night, and it just gobbles them up and says, "Great, good food for making more of myself." Because that's what it will do. You know that you don't take an antibiotic when you have a virus, all right? You have to outgrow it or get your immune system or whatever, but you can't just make it go away with medicine. The second thing a virus does is not only does it duplicate itself, but it infiltrates. That's its second purpose. It infiltrates wherever it can go. So any opening that it has, in it goes. So it's in your ear, it looks over at your eyes, oh, good place for it, oh, it's over here. And if the thing gets out of control, it'll just take away your body and it'll certainly take away your computer, won't it? It'll infiltrate. And the third purpose of a virus, not only does it duplicate and infiltrate, But the third purpose of a virus is to spread. Let me get into another computer. There's another body I can get into. And off this thing goes, making copies of itself, infiltrating wherever it can go, and spreading wherever it can go. Viruses of the mind work exactly the same way, except that there are no little tiny infinitely small particles little, little viral particles. There's nothing there. There's no thing there. Viruses of the mind come from ideas, and a virus of the mind is an idea that has been placed into your mind from another mind, and its purpose is to do exactly what I just described: to duplicate, to infiltrate, and to spread. And you are filled with these viruses of the mind. There are umpteen of them, all right? And they're all called excuses. And these excuses are beliefs that you have had handed to you from well-meaning people who said, "We'll take over from here." And off you go believing that certain kinds of things that happen in your world are happening because there's nothing you can do about it, because this is your truth. And these— the basic building block of genetics is called a gene. The building block of memetics, memetics, which comes from the word mimic, which means to copy, to notice what somebody else is doing and doing it, is called a meme. M-E-M-E. And this is the science of the meme. That lady right there, would you like to read this? Stand up. Yeah, you. Can you catch it? Oh, good. I like "yeah" rather than "I'll try." Okay. So, Richard, this book was another life-changing kind of— and it really gave me the impetus, the idea to to write about not just what to think, but how to change these lifelong thinking habits. So I'd like all of you in this room to think for a moment about something about yourself, whether you've been overweight for your entire lifetime, whether you've struggled with addictions of one kind or another for a lifetime, and you've tried all of the different kinds of things and you come up with, and still you find yourself struggling with, "I can't, I just can't overcome it. I just can't change it. I've been this way, it doesn't work." And what I have done is I have created— I didn't even do it. I'm telling you, this was Lao Tzu at work in my life. Because I was doing my radio show that I do every Monday on hayhouseradio.com. And people call in from all over the world, and someone called in and said that she had channeled, because of what I had written about in Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, she had channeled a drawing of Lao Tzu. Now, no one has really— we didn't have— we don't even have any pictures of Lao Tzu. We just have people imagining what Lao Tzu must have looked like. And she drew this, she had this beautiful drawing and she sent it to me. And as soon as I opened it up, I said, "Oh my God." It spoke to me. It sits there in my writing space and I look at it and every time I do and then I get quiet, it's like whatever I need, just I put my hand out. So I don't use computers. I write everything by hand. And I just put my arm on the table and it just starts coming through me. I call it automatic writing. It's when you really let go and let God, when you really understand that even this speech that I'm giving right now and these words that are coming from someplace, I have no idea where, into me and through and into this little instrument I'm hearing and coming out to you, I don't own any of this stuff. I just let it come. I just trust in it and I know that if I stay true to those four virtues and just live from that perspective, that whatever I need will be there. So I don't get to own any of it. And I feel that way and I felt that way particularly as I was writing Excuses Be Gone. And it was Lao Tzu and that great teaching that was coming to me that basically said, "I will give you a paradigm for change." to help people to overcome a lifetime of thinking habits. Now, these memes that were placed into your mind, I wrote out 18 of them. They, uh, if you're thinking about changing something about yourself, anything at all, even the fact that you haven't been able to manifest prosperity or the right kind of relationships or, you know, overcome illnesses or not do some athletic event, whatever it might be, something that you have been unable to do. You'll— these are the memes. And then at the end, I'm going to go through this paradigm for you very quickly. It's— I have seen— I just did a workshop in in Maui for about 500 people from all over the world last weekend, or the weekend before, with my friend Ram Dass. And by the way, he could definitely use your prayers tonight. He, after the seminar, he fell out of his wheelchair and cracked his hip and had to have a hip replacement. And was, when I was with him at the hospital on Sunday before I came here, He still wasn't able to breathe on his own, but it looked better when I talked to him on the phone. So if you love Ram Dass as I do, his deepest prayers, your deepest prayers would be much appreciated. At any rate, the year before I started just thinking about this paradigm, and we had a woman there, her name was Suzanne, and she's from Toronto. Actually from London, Ontario, and she had binged and purged for 22 years without missing a day. She looked like death walking. Hollow eyes, sallow skin, sadness, shaking, quivering whenever she would— brilliant, very intelligent woman, binging and purging every day for 22 years. And we ran her through the paradigm in 40 minutes in front of 600 people. And just when we were there on October the 27th, she celebrated her 1-year anniversary of not binging and purging. She did it in 40 minutes. That's how powerful what I'm talking about is. Any excuses be gone. And here are a few of these excuses that we use, none of which measure up. And hold any truth. It will be difficult if I want to change. That's a meme. The idea that if you've had a habituated way of thinking and being and behaving, and if you've had it for a lifetime, one of the things that you'll hear people say, they say it all the time, is it's going to be difficult to change that. Second one is that it will be risky. A third is that it will take a long time for me to change. That there will be family drama. These are all memes. That I don't deserve it. That it's not my nature. That I can't afford it. That no one will help me. That it's never happened before. That I'm not strong enough. That I'm not smart enough. That I'm too old. Or I'm too young. I thought of that one when they asked me to do a film, which meant giving up a month of my life and doing 14 and 16-hour days from 7 in the morning till 9, 10 at night, sometimes staying up all night filming and refilming and refilming and refilming. And you don't just do a, you know, to get one minute on the screen might take 4 hours easily. And to put myself through that and to take direction and to be told what to say and how to say it and where to stand and what the shadows are and to just give it all up and just surrender to it and say, "I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to take on something I've never done before and just let it happen in the name of creating something that can transform the world." Are you willing? And I said, "Yes." And I remember how I surrendered. As we went to— we filmed out in a place called Asilomar, just south of Monterey, California, for an entire month. It's like, to let go of the meme that I'm too old to do something like that, that I can't change, that it's not something that I could do. You just let go of those. That the rules won't let me, that it's too big, that I don't have the energy, that my family history won't allow it, that I'm too busy, that I'm scared. All of these and many, many, many more, all of these are none of the things that God does. The Tao needs no excuses, does it? God needs no excuses whatsoever. It's just being. This concept, you want to be that way. You want to let go of every one of these memes that have been handed to you by well-meaning people that are invisible ideas that were placed into your head that have duplicated so frequently and have infiltrated so much that in your schools and in your culture and in your religious training and so on, you begin to adopt these things and they become your truths. When in fact they don't hold up to that at all, as you'll see when I run you quickly through the paradigm at the end of my time here with you this morning. So what I have done here this morning is I have invited someone to come here and be with you today. And I want to tell you a little bit about him because this is a person who, if ever was someone who had excuses available to them to give up, it would be my friend Dan Caro. Dan, on the— on St. Patrick's Day, 1982. He was 2 years old, a baby. His mother was sitting outside a garage, and Dan wandered into this little garage, and there was a gasoline can on the floor, and there were fumes in the room, in the garage, and there was a water heater, and a spark from the water heater ignited the fumes, and this little baby boy, 2 years old, was engulfed in flames and burned alive. Just whoosh! And there was this huge flame and a scream, and his mother came running in from the garage and put her arms around him and put the flames out. And he was burned over 77% of his body, severely burned, and was told that there was no chance that this little boy was going to survive. When he finally went to the Shriners Burn Hospital and they put— they wrapped his arms and they wrapped his legs and they did all the things that they do to burn victims. When they took the bandages off of his hands, his fingers came off with them. And when they took the bandages off of his feet, his toes came off with them, and his nose came off, and everything about his body was burned to a crisp. This was a little boy who was given this destiny on this planet. I've invited him here to you this morning because I am going to put him on my public television special that we're going to do on Excuses Be Gone in January. Because I want the world to see, just like we did with Immaculée Ilabegiza, the woman who survived in Rwanda living in a bathroom for 81 days— 91 days being hunted by the killers that were after all the Tutsis in Rwanda. Many of you have seen her story and read her book Left to Tell. She has a new one out called Led by Faith. Which is even more provocative and compelling. I invited Dan to come in here, speak to you for a few moments, and then he's going to perform for you. He has no fingers, he has no hands. He has lived with the consequences of that day, and he has been rated as one of the top drummers in the state of Louisiana. And you say, how could that possibly be? Well, that's what those drums are doing here this morning. And I'm going to have you let Dan talk to you for 5 minutes or so and then perform for you for 5 minutes. So I'd like you to give a very warm welcome— this is the first time he's ever done this— Dan Caro. Come on up, Dan. I'm not done.
I'll give it to you.
So beautiful. You have a mic.
Thank you so much. I appreciate this. Thank you, Wayne Dyer, for inviting me here. This is truly an honor. You've inspired me more than you'll ever know, as I'm sure everyone in this room will attest to. Thank you. Throughout my life, people have told me that I have a right to complain, a right to make excuses, to not do. I have no right to complain. I have no right to make excuses. What makes me different than you? And do any of you have rights to complain and make excuses?
I personally think none of us have that right.
I never wanted to be viewed as different. And I attempted to perform every task any normal person would do. When I was 5 years old, the task of tying my shoes was on my agenda. Imagine trying to tie your shoes with fists, without fingers. This task would prove to be the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. Some would think drumming with no fingers is. No. Took me 7 years before I was able to tie my shoes for the first time. During that time, I admit I had some doubt. Who wouldn't? 7 years on a simple task. But as that doubt grew inside of me, I felt something inside of me that was pushing me to move forward, to continue this. It made that task possible for me. That task is something that Wayne Dyer has talked about. Now forgive me for echoing some of your themes, but the source that we are connected to will allow us to achieve anything. There are— there can be no excuses. There can be no failures as long as we acknowledge that we are part of that source, that we are part of that God. And that binds us all together. Yesterday I was in Dr. Dyer's room, and, uh, I think we both agree that this, my accident, is what I was born to do, to speak out before you guys. And if I can help just 1, 2, 3 1,000 people, then every moment is worth it for me. I do not see this as a curse, as I'm sure a lot of people do. This is the best gift I have ever been given. So before I was able to find a speaking voice, because about 4 years ago I would not have been able to do this, I found a voice through music. And music allowed me to tell stories that I still can't vocalize, because it's drumming especially, because it's such a primal instrument. Drums were the first instrument. And I feel that I can pull emotions out of me to share and to convey my feelings to you about how passionate I am for living. Because this is what we have right here, right now. And it's a beautiful thing. So if you guys wouldn't mind, I'd like to tell you one of those stories on the drum right now. Thank you.
The way that, uh, Dan and I met was, uh, one of those, uh, synchronistic moments when my friend Tiffany, who happened to be in New Orleans where she is from, was, uh, at a restaurant with her cousin, and Dan happened to be there, and She mentioned that she worked for someone who did motivational work, and Dan said, "That wouldn't be Wayne Dyer, would it?" And the two of them met, and through Tiffany, and there we were in this morning. So if they hadn't been at that exact moment at that exact time, this moment wouldn't be possible, and having him on public television in every city in the country showing the world that excuses need to be gone. Here's Dan, he's going to play a little bit for you on his drums. He uses a wristband, and off he goes. And these, by the way, are drums he has never played on. These were— we rented these drums to be here today. This is his very first time on those drums. Woo! Thank you, Dan. Dan Caro. The third book that I read before writing Excuses Be Gone was written by Sharon Begley. We don't have it here. It's called Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. She is the science writer for Newsweek magazine, and she spent about 10 years with the Dalai Lama, who brought the top neuroscientists from all over the world to his place in Lhasa, over, you know, in India and Tibet, all the places that he brought these great teachers, and would have them all come together and look at the most recent literature that was being done in the field of neurology about what could be done with the brain. For those of you, any of you who are experiencing or have people in your family who are experiencing any kind of depression, I would really recommend you take a real hard look at some of the research that is being done. That the very fact that your brain this physical thing that is inside of your head someplace, that, um, we believe is the source of depressing thoughts that we have, that if you understand that it isn't necessary to be taking medicine all the time to rearrange the circuitry of your brain, which is what these antidepressant medicines really do, they really stimulate the formation of serotonin, which is the feel-good enzyme in the brain, isn't it? It's like the more serotonin we have, the better that we feel. And what they're discovering is that when they train people to think about how they think— in other words, very often a person who suffers from depression of any kind, and it doesn't have to be clinical depression. It can be depressing thoughts that you have at any moment, like, you know, you dropped a vitamin on the floor, and like that happened to me the other day, and it just frigging disappeared. It was just, it's just gone. It just disappeared. And I was on the floor looking down with my eyes this way, that way, under the, pulling the carpet up, and it's just gone. And that's depressing. I mean, uh, Where the hell? How could it just— it just went from here to there. I still haven't found that vitamin. It's just like— it's just gone. So I mean, just a simple little thing like that. Or, you know, the moments in your life when you just— you know, you just lose it. You know, it's something that I guess I learned when I was a little boy, but it's that time. And then here you are, a 60-year-old man, and you still find yourself when something is very frustrating, You can't find something, you misplaced it or whatever, and it's just, "Ahhh!" You just lose it, you know? And I know you think that something like that couldn't happen. I don't usually do that around other people, get me? But all alone in my room and there's nobody there, there's nothing like just letting one of those out, "Ahhh! I can't take it! Where is it?" And then you come back and you remind yourself that you're a spiritual master and that You're a prophet and— or if it's clinical depression or whatever it is, that when instead of thinking— what we're doing now with patients who have this, instead of saying, "Okay, here's a Zoloft, here's some kind of a drug that we're going to give you and we're going to rearrange the synapses of your brain so that it works differently," and most of the time we don't even know what's going on inside the brain when we— we We dispense these— you know, the field of psychiatry has basically become a drug peddling field. It really has. Almost people go now to psychiatrists, psychiatric treatment, basically to get some kind of a drug to take so that their life will get better. You know, so that things— so that all of the things that we were so consumed with. You know, that the Dalai Lama said in there, he said, if we could take every child in the world, every child in the world, at the age of 5, and have them meditate on compassion for 1 hour a week, we could eliminate all violence and depression on this planet in 1 generation. Can you imagine? 1 generation! Just thinking compassion, about thinking about others. And one of the things that they taught in "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," which has a lot of— you know, it's a little tougher read than what I've been talking to you about, but it's— the scientific evidence in there is so clear that when a person is about to be depressed and they do an MRI and they'll look at the brain and they'll see the chemistry of the brain, there'll be a picture of it. Then they train them to think a thought like— thinking of a moment in their life when they felt loved. Just like kinesiology. A moment in your life when you knew that you were as happy as you could be. And you train that person to just move them and say to themselves, instead of saying, "OK, here comes my depression and it's going to get worse," instead of that, saying instead, "There goes my brain misfiring again, and I am going to not be a part of it. I'm going to step outside. I'm going to watch it, and as I watch it, I am going to think a thought of a moment in my life when I felt good, I felt loved, I felt content, I felt happy." And then they train the person to put their thoughts on that, And then they do the MRI again and they look at it and now you got a side-by-side view of the brain and the brain has changed. The chemistry of the brain literally changes when you— you know, I said it in "Power of Intention," I said it in all of my talks— when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. The world becomes a different world. When you change the way you look at it. If you believe you live in a depressing world, you'll be looking for something to verify and validate that for yourself. When you change the way you look at this world, you live in a different world. Okay? So I would recommend you look at that. Now, in the last 10 minutes or so, I'd like to go through this paradigm. Rather quickly, because of— you know, each one of these questions is a chapter in Excuses Be Gone. And that's the third part. The first part talks about Bruce's book and talks about the three books that I've mentioned: Virus of the Mind, Change Your Brain. And then the middle part of the book really looks at the principles that are involved: thinking with awareness, thinking in terms of alignment, Thinking passion, thinking compassion, and then this paradigm which was given to me by my ancient spiritual friend who I can still see walking off out of the villages where they were— everybody was going to continue the warring states to live in peace in his final days, Lao Tzu. So the first of these questions is the most important. It is— the question is, "Is it true?" And as you listen to this paradigm, I'd like you to just really be thinking about not just yourself and the people in your immediate family, but think about our children. It's why, when I was being introduced, I talked about the children's books. You can teach children these principles. Are there any pregnant ladies here in the room? Where are you? Come on up. Come up if you're pregnant. If you'll read this to your growing fetus, come up. Yeah, you don't have to catch it. I'd like to give you a copy of Incredible You for your new baby. Congratulations. Who already has it? Well then, do you have this one, Unstoppable Me? Well then, get up here. There you go. I want to see a pregnancy test, if you don't mind. Ah, okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, here we go. Anyway, there are 3 of them, and I encourage you to— here we go, one for you. One for you, one for you, and one more. Something's popular out there. There we go. There you are. Thank you. Never too early to start this process. So the first question, let's take the excuse, "It's going to take a long time, it's going to be difficult," because that's the one, particularly for those of you who have suffered with physical maladies, who have suffered with being overweight, who've suffered with not having enough prosperity into your life, I'd like you to just think about the question, "Is it true?" Is the thought that it's going to be difficult to change true? And I'd like to work with someone to do that, but because of time constraints, I can't. So the question of "Is it true?" The fact is, that you think approximately, they say, for those who engage in these accounting practices, about 60,000 thoughts, separate thoughts, every single day. The problem with it is that you're going to think the same 60,000 thoughts today that you did yesterday and again tomorrow. And the real problem with this is about 59,950 of them are not true. They're just memes. They're things, they're viruses that have been planted into your mind to believe that it's going to be difficult. If you think that it's going to be difficult to change, and you're really convinced of that, I ask— I put you through this in the Paradigm and in the therapy, which is: Can you be 100% certain that it's going to be difficult and it's going to take a long time and there's going to be family drama if you were to do what you want to do? Can you be 100% certain that those things are true? The answer to that is no. You can never be 100% certain. So now you have a potential thought that something is going to be difficult. What is— and if you know that it may or may not be true, even if you're absolutely convinced that it's 100% true, but then you start thinking about it, you say, "Well, I can never be sure 100% that it's going to be difficult." is going to be true, then you say to yourself, "I have the option to think a thought which may or may not be true. The first thought, if I think it's going to be difficult, is going to lead me away from where I would like to be. The second thought, which also may or may not be true, is going to lead me to where I want to be. Which one of those thoughts which may or may not be true, would you elect to take? This is what I was taught by Lao Tzu, that if you have a choice to think a thought that may or may not be true, why not pick the one that will lead you to where you would want to be? So what is the reverse thought of "it's going to be difficult"? It's going to be easy, or it's not going to be difficult. Okay? So now you have that choice, and you begin to take that thought, "I'm too old." It may or may not be true. "I'm too young." It may or— "I'm not smart enough." It may— Now, you begin to work this paradigm this way, that every time you have a thought about something which constitutes an excuse, which is nothing more than a meme, then you begin to reverse it, and you begin to make the shift. And as you make that shift, you start thinking thoughts that may or may not be true, but always will lead you closer to where you want to be. So that's the first question: Is it true? The second question is— and again, remember, each of these are a chapter, and I spent a month on each one of these— Where did it come from? Where did the thought that "I can't make something happen, I can't create prosperity, I can't create health in my life"— where did that thought come from? The answer to this question, the short answer to this question is: it came from me. It came from myself. I chose it. It was the way, even though I was a child and it was handed to me and it was imposed upon me, There were other children around me who had the same kinds of things imposed upon them, and they didn't buy into the same excuse that I'm buying into. You take responsibility for everything. Someone asked me in the back, "What about if you have cancer? What about if you have something that has come to you and you can't overcome that? Do I take responsibility for that?" The answer to that is yes. It's not about blame, it's not about karmic paybacks, it's about saying, "I have been a vibrational match to what I have attracted into my life. I'm not guilty for it, I didn't do anything wrong, but it is mine. Because the reason, as I told the gentleman, the reason that you do that is because if something outside of you is responsible for anything going on inside of you, you have to wait for something outside of you to shift and change. Whereas if you take responsibility and begin to say, "I'm choosing this, I've elected this," then you have an opportunity to make it go away, and otherwise you don't. Blame is a guarantee that the excuse will prevail. Okay? And all excuses, no matter what they are, are misalignments. They're all misalignments. That is, you are not aligned with God. God needs no excuses. Third question is, what are the payoffs? Why would I continue to think thoughts that don't work for me and contribute to my having excuses? The payoffs basically are avoidance, it's easier, it's the way that I can manipulate other people. You begin to look through the psychological support system for all of them. And now comes the guts of all of this, of this paradigm. And if you want to know more about this, my friend Byron Katie, who is, I believe, speaking here this afternoon, is that right? One of the great teachers on the planet, one of my closest friends, I spoke to her last night. And her stuff with the work, she has worked with me and been specifically instrumental in helping me to overcome some very difficult things in my own life. She is someone that I have never heard anything ever come out of her mouth other than love. She's one of the kindest spiritual saints walking this planet today, and if you get a chance to hear her, I urge you to do so. She does something called The Work, and one of the questions that I learned from her in this paradigm is, "What would my life look like if I couldn't think the thought that it's going to be difficult. And when I asked Suzanne, who was going through her first day of not binging and purging, "What would your life look like if you couldn't think that this was going to take a long time? If you couldn't think it was going to be difficult? If you couldn't think that you didn't have the ability to change? What if you couldn't think that thought?" Without that excuse, everybody always says, "If I couldn't think it, I would feel free. I would be free." And that's the freedom that comes to it. The fifth question is, "Can I create a rational reason to change?" My son, Sands, who's 21 years old, has a habit, a bad one according to him. He can't get up in the morning. He sleeps till noon, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock every day. It's his rational— he can't get over it. He said, "Dad," he said, "I just can't. I'm just too damn tired. I mean, I just— my eyes, I just can't get up, and I can't go to bed. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed, I have to sleep." So for his 21st birthday, We gave him a trip to Indonesia. Now, he loves to surf. He wakes up, breathes surfing. He's been living on Maui, you know, every summer since he was born. At 4 years of age, I gave him a surfboard, and he went out and paddled out and rode it all the way in at the age of 4. He breathes surfing. He has surfing magazines. He gets up, you know, and does his surf. Before going to Indonesia, he went down to Indonesia and he went on a boat for 10 days to get the best surf that you can find, and they have all these machines and they find out where the waves are, and he's up every morning at 5 o'clock. 5 o'clock! And he surfs all day. They go to these waves, they go to that island, they're doing all of these things, and then comes back, gets back at 10 o'clock at night. At night, sleeps for a couple of— up at 4 the next morning because they've got to— never complains during the whole time because he had a rational reason to change. When I was in junior high school, I was in love with Earlene, and she boarded the bus a block away from me, and I found out that she boarded the bus at 7 o'clock every morning, and I couldn't get up either until I found out that Earlene was getting on the bus stop at 7 AM. I was up at 6 getting ready with my Brylcreem. I had a big wave and, you know, and all of— and my Old Spice, what I would slap on me and walk down there and just hope that she would notice me because when I had a rational reason to change— Do you have a rational reason to change any of these habits in your life? Create one. And then follow the paradigm. The seventh is, can I access universal cooperation in shedding old habits? All you have to do is live the virtues and you access divine cooperation by living the virtues. And finally, how do I continuously reinforce this new way of being? You get quiet, you meditate, You do yoga. You do the kinds of things that I spell out. This is a paradigm. I know I've got to close here in just a couple of moments. What I'd like you to do, I'd like everyone to do, please, to close this out in a perfect way, is to take everything off of your laps, if you will. And I'd like to play a song sung by, I think, the greatest voice on the planet today, certainly one of them, not my daughter, even though She certainly has one of them. Her name is Cecilia. Many of you have heard her on my PBS specials. I asked her to put together a CD that has the top songs that reflect the message of Excuses Be Gone: Amazing Grace, The Prayer of Saint Francis, You Raised Me Up, From a Distance, Ave Maria, I Believe, May It Be, The Rose, I'm going to ask her to sing this song that was created in a quantum moment by John Newton in 1734 as he was crossing the ocean from Senegal in Western Africa with a boatload of human beings to be sold into slavery. He crossed the ocean, ran into a storm like a hurricane, wrote down on the back of an envelope in that moment the words to a song. He was 22 years old, and a slave ship captain, wrote down the words to this song: "I once was lost and now I'm found, and it was grace that taught my heart to feel." And after that storm passed and he survived, he turned his ship around, went back to Africa, released all of the people that were still alive, went back to England, and for the next 55 years became the most ardent abolitionist on the planet and was instrumental in creating his student, William Wilberforce, who was in the House of Lords. And they ended slavery just before he died in 1807. And Wilberforce University, a Black university in Ohio, is the only Black university named after a white man. Who had a vision to end slavery, and it came from this moment. And she's accompanied by the whales, who, where I live on Maui, from December until May, make the sounds that you'll hear. And getting those whales into the sound booths and having the— big, big expense. I once was lost. I once lived in the world. Of excuses. And now I'm found. I reconnected to my source. This song can move the traffic in your car. I've tested it. It calibrates at 499 on the Hawkins scale. If you know Power vs. Force, you know what that means. And it was conceived in a moment that ended that nefarious, hideous practice of slavery on our planet. You were so deeply touched. I'd like you to have a copy of that. Enjoy. So I'd like to close and tell you— whoops— there was a woman, an old woman, who lived by the bank of a river in Nepal, and she was a saint by all means. She carried with her a little container where she kept dried pieces of bread, and one day she found a precious stone. And the stone was so precious that she knew that if she kept it, that she would have everything that she could ever want for the rest of her life. Such was its value, this this huge piece of precious stone. And one day a man came walking by the riverbank where she lived, and he asked if she had any bread or anything to eat because he was hungry. And she opened her little bag and she reached in and she gave him some bread. And as he noticed the bag, he noticed inside was this beautiful shining a precious stone that was his guaranteed security for the rest of his life. And he said, "I'd like to have that precious stone, please." And she said, "Here, if you'd like it, you can have it." And she gave it to him, and he left feeling as if he now was taken care of, as if it was a divine intervention. The next day, he returned to the woman And he said to her, "I'm going to give you back the stone." He said, "But I'd like to give— have you give me something even more precious than that stone." And she said, "What would that be?" He said, "Whatever you have inside of you that allowed you to give me that stone." I'd like you to give to me. In every moment of your life, you have a choice, and here it is: you can either be a host to God or a hostage to your ego, to that false self. It's your choice. God bless you, and thank you for coming today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Thank you so much. You're very kind. Thank you. Namaste. Namaste. Namaste. Thank you. To learn some more incredible Wayne Dyer wisdom, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. We are keeping ourselves from a destiny that we signed up for. Whatever you need will begin to show up. The problem with most of us is that as it begins to show up, we then institute
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