You're Using MANIFESTATION Wrong | Wayne Dyer

As your thought about what it is that you would like to attract moves more and more and more and more towards source energy, which excludes no one, includes all. As you do that, manifestation becomes easier and easier and easier.

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. Write it down, put it in words, whatever you would like to manifest, whatever it might be, write it out and keep it next to where you meditate. And then use this mantra for 20 minutes. And the mantra is—

Wayne Dyer was an icon in self-development and spiritual growth. He wrote over 40 books with an astonishing 21 New York Times bestsellers. His childhood was spent in orphanages and foster homes, but he'd go on to inspire millions and become known as the father of motivation. In this exclusive speech from the Celebrate Your Life stage, Wayne Dyer shares with us the keys to attract wealth into your life, destroy negative thinking, and get in harmony with the universe. Special thanks to Liz Dawn for partnering with us to release this exclusive content on our YouTube channel. Enjoy. Thank you, thank you, thank you so kindly. It's a wonderful treat. I always like to express my gratitude to you for coming to listen to what I have to say. I have 8 children who never do, so it's nice to have Back in the 1960s, when I was a student and a graduate student, there were a group of young boys who came over from a little town in England called Liverpool. And you may remember them. They certainly left a huge mark in the music industry. And they had written a song that I used to hear people singing. It's called, um, "Will You Still Want Me? Will You Still Love Me When I'm 64?" And I used to think at that time, it would be easy to write about that because no one really should really live that long anyway. And if they did, they should just, you know, vote them out and love them, of course. And lo and behold, I turned around and this year that happened to me. I never quite like to have people applaud my age. I don't, uh, it's like you applaud people for being old, all right, and making it this far. But anyway, so it's nice to know that you still want me and love me even though I'm 64. And so I was celebrating my birthday down in North Carolina, and I got this one a wonderful message from all of my children that really sort of personifies the wonderful relationship that we have. It said, "Inside of this birthday card is a very special message from God," which I loved. And I opened it up, it said, "See you soon. Happy birthday." So that'll give you an idea. They're the ones who keep you grounded. I have 6 daughters and 2 sons, and they have always been the ones who have sort of been the people who keep me in that level of reminding myself that there's a fine line between being a guru and being a jerk, you know. And I probably crossed that line more frequently than I should admit up here. I remember my daughter Serena stopping me one morning when I was being a little bit impatient with 5 of them going to the same school— 8th grade, 6th grade, 4th grade, 2nd grade, preschool, something. Anyway, there were 5 in one school, and I would drive them to school, and I raised my voice a little bit and demanded that they hurry on and get going. I had really important spiritual work to conduct. I had a tennis match down, and I always told them, leave me alone, don't bother me. I'm a prophet. I get paid by the thought.

I'm thinking.

So I raised my voice and shouted a bit and acted impatient, and she stopped. She was about 7 or 8, put her hand on her hips, said, I wonder what all those people would think of Mr. Positive if they could see him here this morning. Yeah, she looked at her sister and said, don't think we'd be selling too many books here today. What do you think? You know, would you buy a book from someone who yells at his little children? That's been my treat, my legacy, and a big very important part of my life. There was an interview in the New York Times a few weeks ago, and, um, it was a Q&A with a man that you probably all have heard of. His name's Arthur Miller, and Arthur Miller probably is the world's most famous living playwright today. And his questioner was asking him— he's in his 80s now, I think he's 84 or 85 years old, probably most famous for having been married to Marilyn Monroe for a period of time. But, um, those of you who had to read Death of a Salesman or The Crucible My son is just reading it now in high school, and I was helping him with a paper on it the other night by telephone. They ask Arthur Miller— now this is a man who has reached the highest levels that human beings can reach in the profession that he has chosen. He is at the very pinnacle of his profession. In fact, he has just put out another play. And the question that they asked him was, "Are you working on another play?" And his response was very intriguing. I read it over and over again. I'd like you to really give it some thought. He said, I don't know, but I probably am. And I'd like that to just sort of resonate with you, that whole idea of whether or not you're the one, this body and this mind and this ego that you carry around with you everywhere you go, is really the thing that is in charge of what it is that you are doing, or is there another force? Is there something else out there that is available to you and for you to do the kinds of things that you know that you're destined to do? You know you're here for a reason. But perhaps you haven't allowed yourself to fully engage yourself in what you were intended to be. Carl Jung once said that as he got to the later years in his life, he said, "I just began to realize more and more and more that it wasn't me that was doing what it was that I was doing." And in one of his essays, he said, "At the same moment that you're a protagonist in your own life and you're making choices, at the very same moment, you're also the spear carrier or the extra in a much larger drama." And in fact, All of you are doomed, he said, to make choices. And it's a paradox, isn't it? I mean, if you're doomed, then choices seem to already have been made for you, don't they? But if you're doomed to make choices, then there's a part of you that is in this process of choice-making, and there's a part of you that has to surrender to that which makes all choices. And it's a paradox that you have to learn to live with and get comfortable with, because all of us are living, breathing, walking, talking paradoxes. We live in a body that begins and ends. It has substance, it has form, it has materialness. We can touch it, we can experience it, we can get a hold of it, we can measure it. And we're also in a body that has something inside of it that is orchestrating all of it that we can't find. If I were to stand up here on this stage and say I'm going to wiggle my finger and then I do, you say, well, that's not really such a big deal, anybody can do that. But it is a big deal. It's a very big deal because there's a thought someplace internally inside of us that says, I'm going to wiggle my finger. And then there's a connection between that thought and the wiggling of the finger. And when we go inside and we try to find the command center internally within us, we look in the brain first. That's usually where we think these things originate from. And we try to find the command center. In fact, scientists are pretty good about that, and they have located this command center. Somewhere deep buried in the recesses of the cerebellum in the brainstem. But then we look inside this command center and we can't find the commander. We can't find— there's nobody home. It's what Jung called the ghost in the machine. There's a ghost inside of us, and it's allowing every single one of these movements that I'm making right now and all of the thoughts that I'm having that are being expressed in words and the movement of my arm and all of this. And we have a sense, and we almost take all of this for granted. And yet we are this breathing, walking, talking paradox. And so you have to almost get to a place— F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, you can never reach a state of enlightenment until you're willing to live with two ideas that contradict each other at the same time, at all times. You have to be willing to do that. So if you're looking for something called logic to explain who you are and what you're doing here and what you're capable of doing, you'll never find it. And this ghost in the machine, now we're discovering, when you look you look at the research of a man in England named Rupert Sheldrake, he's talking about, uh, that it's not located in the brain at all, but it's in what he calls morphogenetic fields. And that these energy fields are all around us, and that we all share these same energy fields. And that in quantum physics, they're now starting to talk to us about the connection between just observing. Deepak, I heard her mention— I heard Liz mention, will be here next year. He once said to me, you know, When quantum physics is not only stranger than you think it is, it's stranger than you can think. Because at the quantum level, at the, you know, before Einstein and before Niels Bohr and before Max Planck and so many of these great scientists who offered us a whole new perspective on science, there was Newtonian physics. And Newtonian physics essentially said the atom is the building block of nature. But now we study looking for the source, looking for where everything comes from. Now we discover that atoms are like huge, great big blocks in comparison to a subatomic subatomic particle, trillions and trillions of them fitting on the head of a pin. And everything originates from these particles. And these particles are so bizarre that when you observe them in a certain way, they change depending upon how you observe them. So that when you look at a quantum particle called a quark, which is where everything begins, and you notice it one way, you turn around and you look at it again, just by nature of the way that you observe it determines how it will behave. And imagine with all of us, because I've always said that whether you look through the telescope or whether you look through the microscope, it's impossible to say which has the grander view. Both of them lead to infinity. We have a tendency to think of ourselves as beginning and ending with these particles. So you try to find out your source, you try to find your source, and, um, you look at the little drop of human protoplasm that began you, and then you examine that and you put that under a stronger microscope and you look through the atoms and you look through the electrons, and then you look through the subatomic particles. And then you take the subatomic particle, you're just looking for your source, and you put it into a particle accelerator right here in Arizona. And these quantum physicists, they rev them up at 250,000 miles an hour. This is you I'm talking about, at the very, very, very, very beginning of who you are. And we rev it up, but collide them at 250,000 miles an hour, and we open it up. Guess what's there? Nothing. There's nothing there. Quantum physicists are now discovering what Jesus said 2,000 years ago. It's the spirit that gives life. And what is spoken in the Torah, in Genesis Genesis 1:2, and the Spirit of God moved across the waters and all things emanated from that Spirit. So that if you want to know the fundamental truth of quantum physics, it's that particles themselves do not create more particles. It takes something other than a particle, other than something in the world of form, in order to be able to create form. That all form in the universe emanates from an energy field that has no beginnings and no ends. It comes from perfect oneness, and you can call it God, or you can call it soul, or you can call it spirit, or you can call it one mind, universal truth. You can call it God. Whatever it is that you call it, it doesn't really matter. It is out of this perfect oneness that has no form that everything originates. And another fundamental truth of quantum physics is that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. This is a truth, so that if you can, in the time that I have with you, get a perspective on how you're going to look at the world, you can make the world change. Imagine if all of us were indeed nothing but one quark, one tiny little subatomic particle in one huge cell called humanity, and that, that was true what I just spoke, that when you change the way you look at things, the things you looked at change. If you could get that, that simple little truth— last Thursday I was in New York at the Einstein School of Medicine at Yeshiva University, and every year they have this special award that they give. It's called the Einstein Award, and it's given to to the person who exemplifies or works in their life in the previous year to represent the humanistic work of Albert Einstein. And I was the recipient of that award this year, last Thursday. Thank you. When I got there for this award, I had to brush up on my Einstein. And I know that a lot of you probably know the theory of relativity and how it works, and you've probably heard the formula E mc². We all know that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. And you could all explain relativity if this were an exam, a final exam in a course. Well, I thought so, because when I got there, the people that I was to talk to were all of the medical staff and the medical interns and the residents and all of the people who worked at the School of Medicine there. And I asked them the same thing, and no one volunteered to explain the theory of relativity. So I thought I would. So I studied on it and I worked on it, and now a man named Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany back in the late 19th and early 20th century attempted to explain relativity when he said, all things being relative, what time does Munich stop at this train? Let that move across the room here. But here we are, we're on a planet that is hurtling through space at something like 12,000 miles per hour. So we're really moving very fast. And at the same moment that we are hurtling through space at 12,000 miles per hour, We are also spinning on our axis once every 24 hours. So we're not only hurling, but we're spinning while we're hurling. And while we're hurling and spinning, we're also orbiting around another body that is moving at 12,000+ miles per hour. So we are hurling, spinning, and orbiting all at the same time, and we sit here and think that we're sitting still. And then we observe on this hurling, spinning, orbiting oblate spheroid that we live on called Earth, we notice when we get to Munich that there's a train that appears to stop. And Nietzsche is saying, if everything is relative, it's just as possible that Munich has come to a stop at this train as the train has come to a stop at Munich, right? Now, you may wonder what the relevance of this is, but everything is relative. But it's still— there's a lot of confusion out there. I can see it and sense it. So I came up with the dire interpretation of the theory of relativity, and it goes like this: all things being relative, In a bowl of soup, this is a lot of hair.

What do you think?

So if you were at a restaurant here in Phoenix and they brought you a bowl of soup and there was this much hair in it, you'd call the waiter over and you'd say, "Excuse me, that's a lot of hair." Wouldn't you? It's all relative. But the other thing that Einstein said and observed that was so relevant for me in my talk there and in my talk here tonight is that the most important decision that you will ever make is the decision about whether you live in a friendly universe or in a hostile universe. He said if you make the decision that you live in a hostile universe, then you will set yourself up, relatively speaking, to experience and see and have attracted towards you the fulfillment of that belief in where you live. And so as you look at the important decisions that you have to make in your own life, I suggest you make the decision about what kind of a universe you live in. Now, you are going to be continuously inundated with a system, particularly a system of broadcasting and television and so on, which would like to convince you that we live in a very unfriendly and a very hostile universe. And you get messages like that directed at you all the time on a regular basis, right? You see it on the news, depressing news, depressing news. Then you go to commercials Sponsored by antidepressants. What a surprise. What a surprise. And if you decide that you live in a different kind of a universe, then it is almost incumbent upon you to look out at it and understand that when you change the way you look at things, when you change the way you look at this world— for example, there was just an election, you probably heard about it, it just completed last week, and My children were not 100% enthused with the total outcome of that election. Let me just put it that way, all right? And this is not a political statement of any kind. And I was telling my daughters that morning after the election that— who were all upset and all of that— that if we decide to look at the world and the way things are going, and if half of the people in this country plus a few believe that it ought to be going in this direction, then you can change the way you look at that right now and make a decision about what the next 4 years and what the rest of your life is going to be like, independent of who sits in political offices and who is elected to various places in your life. And you don't want to allow yourself to be in a position where what people someplace else in another city and far away are making decisions about for you. And one of the things that I'll be speaking about a little bit later on in the last 30 minutes or so will be how we can, within ourselves, go to a place where we communicate with our source, the place from which all things emanated, including ourselves, and change the way we look at things. And ultimately, by knowing that, that will change what it is that we're looking at, just by virtue of the fact of how we decide to process things. So if you were to ask me the question that was asked of Arthur Miller, "Are you working on another book?" my response would be, "I don't know, but I probably am." And what I probably am working on is the answer to this question of why wouldn't I know is the difference between what people have labeled me. I've even seen it in your program here, who have said that I have often been called the father of motivation. Now, I've already the father of enough, all right? I don't need anything called motivation to be the father of. And motivation is something that I have come to the conclusion after doing this out there in the public for almost 30 years now, that you really can't provide for another person. That motivation is essentially getting a hold of an idea and carrying that idea through to its logical conclusion, or to the conclusion that you have decided on ahead of time, and not allowing any obstacles to interfere with you attracting into your life what you want. A highly motivated person gets a hold of an idea and follows it through. The opposite of motivation is inspiration, and inspiration is the reverse, because it isn't you getting a hold of an idea and carrying it through. It's an idea gets a hold of you, and it takes you where you signed up to go but forgot, where you were intended to be from a field of intention that Castaneda spoke about in the active side of infinity, that intention isn't something that we do. It is a field of energy from which all things are intended. And he said sorcerers, that is, people who live of the source, are not so much concerned with understanding this link between themselves and this field of intention from which they emanated, but they are more concerned with cleansing it of the numbing effects brought about by living their lives at ordinary levels of consciousness. The numbing effects brought about by living at ordinary levels of consciousness, which means to me that you are living, you have a corroded link between yourself and this field of energy from which you emanated. And the reason that it is so corroded and so distorted and so dirty and so incomplete in your life is because you have opted to live a life that has been programmed for you by something other than this internal knowing that you have about why you're here. Whether it is your culture, whether it is your parents, whether it is the pressures that you have felt because you've just gotten used to doing something a certain way, whatever it might be, that you find yourself living this life, but inside of you there is this gnawing kind of internal pushing yourself in the direction of something else. But nobody understands it quite, because nobody can, because inspiration means in spirit. And when you're in spirit, you have left behind all of the concerns and all of the things that other people would have us believe is what our life's purpose is. So that connecting to this field of intention— and, and here's my question to you. My question to you is, why is it such a stretch to believe that the purpose of our life was already in what Khalil Gibran said, the great Lebanese poet: when you are born, your work is placed in your heart? I'd say it's even before you're conceived. It's when you made that shift from the world of spirit into that tiny little subatomic particle that began you. When that moment of going from formless to form moved you into spirit, you moved in spirit. You became inspired. And you signed up for that, and you know that. There's a part of you that knows it. And no one else can understand it. No one else can get it. And you want to get yourself to a point where you don't explain it and you don't defend it, because when you do You involve the ego, and the moment that you involve the ego, you take away the capacity to create. So the question I have for you is, why is it such a stretch to believe that the shape of your body, the shape of your life, the shape of your eye, your physicalness, every physical attribute that you have right here— and all of you know that these physical attributes that define your body were not something that you choose every day. I hold a hair up on the pillow in the morning and ask the metaphysical question, what held it in yesterday?

I don't know.

You know things are drooping. You know the hair color is changing. You know the skin is sagging a little bit. My kids love to pinch behind the back of my hand and then count how long it takes for it to return. They think it's cute. 5 seconds, Dad. Last year it was only 4. No, watch mine. You know that the physicalness that you are is like a future pull that is in a tiny little microscopic dot that began at the moment of your conception. But that tiny little microscopic dot, if we take it back to find out where it really emanated from, from the quantum perspective I just outlined, you would discover that it didn't come at all from a physical perspective. It came from the world of formlessness. If the shape of your eye and the shape of your legs and the shape of your body and the color of your skin and everything else about you in a physical sense not only emanated from a tiny little drop of human protoplasm, but it actually emanated from an energy field that is formless, then why is it such a stretch to assume that your life and your purpose and what you were intended to be is also in that same energy field? It's so mysterious to just watch your body go through what it's going through, but to understand that what you're here for, what you signed up for, what your source is— and what I want to spend the time that I have here with you this afternoon, I want to go back to this source because that's what I'm working on. I think I probably am because I can't stop it. It's been the same for as many years as I've been writing books, and I've written 25 of them. And in each of these experiences, particularly since a book called You'll See It When You Believe It back in the '80s, which represented a major shift in my life from psychology into spirituality, that it's almost as if it can't be stopped. When you become inspired, Patanjali said, 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. And then he said, I love this, dormant forces, that is, forces that you thought were not available to you, were dead, inactive. When you become inspired now, he said, dormant. When you move into spirit, dormant forces, faculties, and talents come alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. Dormant forces— you begin to have a collaboration with fate and what Jung called synchronistic events and synchronistic people. And the right— all kinds of everythings begin to show up for you and work for you. And at the beginning, when this first starts happening for you, you go, Whoa, booga booga booga! You're not going to believe this. I was just thinking about so-and-so and I couldn't get them out of my mind, and then the telephone rang and it was them, and they answered the phone, and I just— and you call everybody that you know. You need to get something done, you need to get something fixed, you need to have something work in a new way, and you can't figure out how to get it done. And then you're driving along the freeway and you look and it says, we will fix whatever it is you need fixed.

And you go, whoa!

What happened? And you follow them down the highway, jotting down the numbers to get things working for you. Everybody— this is a universal human experience. I don't even have to ask for a show of hands because I know that everybody in the room has experienced this kind of a thing. But what I'd like to suggest to you, as you begin to move up this ladder that I'm going to be presenting here in a few moments, as you begin to move up this way towards vibrating to a faster and a faster energy, to Source energy, you get yourself to a place where you not only are no longer calling everybody that you know when it happens, but you start to have a sort of an expectation. Why, of course, I've been thinking about this. This is something. And when I think about it and I have a vibrational match with my desire, and what it is that I am thinking matches up with what it is that I would like to create, and I'm on the same frequency there, why, of course it's going to materialize. I would expect nothing else. And then you get to a point where you almost get a little bit arrogant about it, you know, What's taking you so long? And it becomes— these dormant forces are no longer dormant, and it's all about moving into this energy field, moving closer to Source. The basic message that I have for you here tonight is that you came from a Source energy that I call the field of intention, and your job in every thought and in every feeling and in every action is to get yourself yourself back into harmony with that source. At the end, I will give you my— what I think of as the 5 most important things that you can do when you attempt to communicate with your source. How to communicate with source. And I think almost all of us have been taught to communicate with source in a way that source can never hear us. And we always wonder why our prayers don't work, because we are expecting our source to be something that we are instead of what it is. So I'll talk about those at the end. But for now, I'd like you to just hold that thought that it's like moving into Source. And this Source— I'm going to use this.

I like this.

I'm going to use this as Source tonight. This is great.

I love that.

And every time I'm over here, I'm going to refer to this as Source. Now, one of the things that, uh, if you've watched PBS specials that I have been doing since 1998, and if you haven't, you've probably just emerged from the dead because they play it every day, don't they? I get people throwing things at me in airports when I walk through. Don't they have anything else on that damn television? It's not my fault. I just recorded it and they keep playing it. Well, the fact is that at this date right now, we have just completed the tallies for the last 4 years, and we've raised almost $72 million for public television. So it's been a wonderful, wonderful journey. And PBS, of course, thinks that I'm raising money for them, and I think that's great, but I'm just using their frequencies to raise consciousness. That's why I'm out there. That's why I do it. And I love it. One of the people that has been on all of the shows with me throughout this entire experience has been my daughter Sky. She's here with me this evening, and she sang Amazing Grace at the beginning.

I think we'll have her close with that later tonight.

I asked her to travel with me, and I told the story on PBS about how this works, because you're listening to somebody who really believes this stuff and practices it and lives it on a regular basis. I was being interviewed in Chicago this summer, and a woman said to me, she said, you know, there are a lot of people out there who would suggest that you're making a lot of money off of these books and tapes and programs that you're putting out there. And I said, well, they would be right.

I am.

A lot of money. I said, yes, that's true. And she said, well, don't you feel a little bit guilty about making money off of these kinds of things? I said, well, you know, I really would feel guilty. I would like to feel guilty about it. I said, but it's not my fault. She said, what do you mean it's not your fault? I said, well, money is just a symbol of the abundance that the source offers for the entire universe. It's just, it's an endless supply and it's It's just one symbol of it, and it really doesn't care where it goes. And wherever I go, it just follows after me.

I just—

it's not really my fault. She said, what are you talking about? I said, well, I lived in foster homes and orphanage when I was a kid, and I was the richest kid in the orphanage. I said, everybody else used to talk about not being able to get money to buy a Coca-Cola for themselves or a donut or whatever. And to me, it was just so simple. I just always felt that I was entitled to have money show up in my life. And because of that belief, because of that absolute knowing, that I was entitled to have this abundance show up in my life, I acted upon that belief. And as a result of acting upon it, when it would snow, I'd go out and shovel people's snow. First, I used to ask on the doors, "Would you like to have your snow shoveled?" And people would say no. Then I discovered if you go out and shovel the snow and then tell them, "I shoveled your snow," and you go up there with your best little, you know, orphan behavior, dress up as Oliver, wear your mittens that have holes in them—

they're better than the good mittens you have back in the drawer—

bite your fingers so they look red, get your ears nice and red.

I just shoveled your walk.

Sometimes you get a dime.

Once I got a quarter.

It doesn't sound like much, but that was 1947. That's $2,000 in today's money. People used to drink soda bottles, and we— I found out that you could get 2 cents for a soda bottle, for a soda pop bottle. I used to follow people around who were drinking soda pop. Excuse me, uh, will you be done with that soon? What do you want?

What are you doing?

Well, I'll just, uh, when you're done, I'll just take the bottle off of your hands. And would take them back. I'd go down to the grocery store and carry out little old ladies' groceries And in a sense, that's what I do today, just to larger audiences in a little different form. But abundance is something that you attract into your life because you have an awareness internally that you're entitled to it and that it is something that you are already a part of. And if you put—

you don't have—

it's like I've told Skye when she wanted to get her CD out there. I said, honey, you've got to contemplate yourself as surrounded by the conditions which you wish to produce. Always contemplate yourself surrounded by the conditions you wish to produce. One of the favorite observations I made from the Thomas Troward lectures back in 1907 in Scotland, the Dore lectures, he said, we know that by the very nature—

now get this, this is really good—

we know that by the very nature of the creative process, we are one with the originating spirit. We are one with the spirit from which we emanated, and therefore we are one with all of the principles of its being. And consequently We are one with its infinite personality. And therefore, our contemplation of it— get this— our contemplation of it, it being this creative process, is the power which we want to give us the ability to use that power. It is only in the contemplation of that power that you are able to get that power. And you cannot contemplate what you don't want, which almost all of you do on a regular basis, and keep getting surprised that what you don't want keeps showing up. The law of flotation, as I've told Sky 10,000 times, was not discovered by the contemplation of the sinking of things. The law of flying 100 years ago was not discovered by the contemplation of the staying on the ground of things. Imagine the Wright brothers saying, this thing will never get off the ground, and going to Kitty Hawk with that kind of a belief system. It is in the ability to get that vibrational match that I just spoke about that I want to move to now. And that vibrational match that I'm speaking about is to look at any desire that you might have in your life and to understand one of the things that Einstein suggested also, which I spoke about last week in New York, was that everything in this universe is energy and that nothing happens until something moves, said Einstein. That it's a universe of movement, a universe of energy, and that that if you could get and understand that it— I was down in Australia and they asked me on a TV show down there in August, what is your mission? And without even hesitating, and I wasn't even sure where it came from, I said my mission is God realization. And she said, well, what do you mean by that? And I wasn't even quite sure. I know that I came across a quote. One of my very favorite observations is this quotation from Swami Paramahansa. Now listen to this. Self-realization, he said, means that we have been consciously connected with our source of being. Consciously connected with our source of being. Once we have made this connection, then nothing can go wrong. So if you can make the connection to God realization, if you can do that and understand what it is and what it means— now, in The Power of Intention, I've talked somewhat about connecting to this source, and I've tried to When I sat down to write it, I sat down with a purple pen and a pad of paper, and I just allowed it to flow through me. It was the same thing that I was telling you before about contemplating, seeing, thinking from the end, thinking from the end, always acting as if what it is that you would like to attract into your life is already here. A few years back, I put together a PBS special, and it's based upon a little book that I wrote for my children. It's called 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace, and one of those secrets is to act as if what you would like to attract is already here. Act as if what you would like to attract is already here. I remember a woman telling me one time, she said, "I was telling my daughter who was talking so fast, and she was saying this and she was saying that." And finally the mother said to the daughter, she said, "You're getting ahead of yourself. You're getting ahead of yourself." And her daughter stopped and said, "Isn't that the point?" And it is the point. To absolutely get out in front of yourself and act as if what you intend to create is already here, and then work from that perspective. Also, one of these 10 secrets is, uh, one that I wrote when I was 19 years of age, and it's to understand a very important lesson. When I was in the Navy, I was reading Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and here was a man who was a judge who would back and forth every day, a commuter living a life that had been programmed for him by someone else, and he hated his job and he hated his work and he hated his life, and he particularly hated his wife. And it went through the the whole thing. And as a matter of fact, he got to the end of his life and he was lying there on his deathbed, and his wife, this woman that he despised, was holding his hand. And he looked up at her, and his last words in the story were, "What if my whole life has been wrong?" And then he died. You don't want to get to that place in your life. So here we are, moving toward Source, and it's called God realization. But there's much, much more to it than just making it into sort of like a religious experience. In fact, it isn't even a religious experience. There's a book that has just come out. I bring it with me now. It's only been out a couple of weeks. I think I've been asked to write the foreword to probably 1,000 books in the last 25 years. I've written two. One is for Earl Nightingale, dear friend who was one of the great pioneers, wrote The Strangest Secret and really brought me into this field of recording and so on with his company back in Chicago before he passed away, called Nightingale-Conant. And then this book, well, Abraham is a collection of of disembodied spirits, if you will, that have been coming through a woman named Esther Hicks from San Antonio, Texas since 1986. I think I've been listening to the Abraham Tapes for about 16 or 17 years now, and the teachings are the most profound, I believe, available on the planet today. And when Abraham asked me through Esther to write the foreword to their book, Ask and It Is Given, I couldn't say no. How do you say no to disembodied spirits? Who knows what kind of, you know, they may know James Van Praagh for all I know. I mean, I don't want to take any chances. So I did, and I have brought some with me, and they'll be available at the end of the talk in the back of the room. This book, all I can say to you, it's not something I make a profit on. It's sold for what I paid for it. It's sold through Hay House. It is perhaps the clearest statement yet of how to manifest what it is that you want. And connect yourself to your desires in a vibrational sense. Ask and it is given. And one of the things that Abraham suggests is that we can align ourselves with this source energy in virtually every single thought that we have. So now you think in terms of launching some kind of a desire, one kind or another. And as you launch this desire, you ask yourself, what is it that I would like to attract into my life and where are my thoughts? Now remember, every thought that you have is an energy, is a vibration, and so is a desire, a vibration. If you launch a desire to attract into your life something that is missing, but you are thinking about or talking about or putting your energy on it not being able to show up— last night Last night at dinner, one of the young ladies in Serena's sorority here at ASU was talking about what a— that it's easier. I was talking about being able to manifest anything that you want, and she said something to the effect that, yeah, but it's very difficult to do that. Now think about that response, that it's difficult to do something, and how does it align or how does it balance up with what it is that I want to attract into my life? I'd like to get this job. It's likely that I won't get it. I would like to attract this relationship into my life. That's the kind of thing that'll probably never happen for me. I would like to be able to overcome this addiction. Overcoming addictions is an impossibility. Whatever it might be that you are launching as a desire has an energy to it, usually a very high energy, a very high frequency. And then you have to now begin to look at what every single time that you have a thought that is inconsistent with that— this is called resistance, and Abraham speaks about this absolutely brilliantly in Ask and It Is Given and gives some very specific— I've never seen a book that is clearer on how to get yourself to this place where you can match this up. Now, the ultimate matchup is with Source, because Source energy is the energy that is all-providing. Here's how Jesus speaks as the supposed, quote, author of A Course in Miracles. Here's the speaking of the author of the Course: If you want to be like me, I will help you. Knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different than me, I will wait until you change your mind. So what I'm asking you to do is look at, in the next few moments, look at the capacity for changing your mind. I read a book this past summer called Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. Wonderful book. If you suffer from any kind of back pain, I recommend it. It's about 80, 90 pages. I didn't bring it with me. I bring books that really touch my life with me, but I couldn't get copies of this thing. And he suggests that something like 98% of the people in the country who suffer from back pain suffer from it not because there's anything wrong with their back, even though they have pain. And that if you did a— if you do a diagnosis of it, you may see subluxations and you may see little cracks and you may see a wearing away of the material between the discs and you may see all of these kinds of things. And that because you see them and because you look at X-rays and because you go through this process and you talk to people in the field, who are a part of this kind of consciousness, that you walk away believing that you have something wrong with your back. And as a result of believing that you have something wrong with your back, you create this enormous stress on yourself, particularly if you've been very active in your life, if you've been an athlete, if you've run, and so on. And then you start contemplating yourself being in a wheelchair or not being able to move or not being able to get about, and so on. And in the process of thinking about this, you create this enormous stress on yourself. And this stress that you create on yourself is the cause of what he says about 98 out of 100 cases of back pain. This is a medical doctor who has studied this back pain thing. Every time there's a Newsweek, uh, cover story on back pain, John Sarno is the person that they consult. But what he said, which is most alarming, is that if you— and I was— he was talking to me because I was experiencing back pain playing tennis and running and all of these kind of things, and I could feel it in my back. And I was saying all of the things that he said everybody says in there. And then I'm looking— as I'm reading the book, I'm looking for some suggestions. I'm looking for some helpful kinds of things that I can use to get rid of my back pain. And he never offers any in the whole book. All he says is that it takes about 8 weeks of every single day affirming to yourself that there's nothing wrong with your back. Just continuously affirming that to yourself, that there's nothing wrong with my back. And instead of when you're going to get up from having dinner and you get ready for that, you get up and you say, there's nothing wrong with my back, and you just get up. And when you're going to get out of bed in the morning, instead of expecting it to be— you just— there's nothing wrong my back. And he said it takes 8 weeks, and if you can accept the diagnosis, you'll eliminate your back pain. The problem is that people cannot accept the diagnosis because they've got pain and they've got cracks and they've got subluxations and they've got people telling them they need to have surgery or any number of things that are going on in their life. So it's what Abraham calls resistance. There is allowing and there is resistance, and resistance is is taking on a set of internal beliefs within yourself that something can't work out, that I can't do this, that it's impossible. See, if you understand that what you think about is what expands, then what you think about is going to create for you the very reality of your life. And if what you think about in your life about what is missing— for example, if your thoughts are on what's missing and you launch a desire to have what's missing be replaced, but your thoughts are continuously on what's missing. And every time you call your mother, you talk to her about what's missing. And every time you talk to your boyfriend or your girlfriend, you talk to them about what's not there. And you're continuously going through in your mind all of the reasons why this rocket of desire that you have launched to attract into your life what you want is something that you can't get. So what do you do? How do you get yourself to shift you begin to say probably the 5 most important words that I can offer you here this evening, which are: I intend to feel good. I intend to feel good. I intend to feel good. I want to feel good. Now, when you say I want to feel good, I'm suggesting to you here that you understand what this word good means. If you go to the Gnostic Gospels that were discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945 in a place called Nag Hammadi, the gospels that never got into the Bible, the gospel that, um, in the 4th century by a man who was the Emperor Constantine, who was also the Pope and in charge of everything. And he decided by convening this Council of Nicaea that, uh, what was going to be in the Bible, in the New Testament, from now on, and that anything else that had been in there up until then would be discarded, would not be allowed. So here comes this council, and they take the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Saint Thomas, two gospels that were were written at the time that Jesus walked on the planet by the people who were most close to Jesus at that time, when they backdate it, when they carbon test it and carbon date it, they discover that Mary Magdalene in her gospel, which I have read, never refers to God as God, refers to God always as the good, as did Plato, the good. 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. When my friend John Mundy in 1977 went to India and he was visiting a very famous spiritual master named Swami Muktananda, Muktananda, who many considered to be the reincarnation of Christ on this planet at that time. He had the gift of fish and loaves, the ability to manifest from his consciousness just by having no time lag between his thoughts and what he would like to attract into his life, just be there. Which all of you, even the least among you, can do all that I have done and even greater things. It's within each and every one of you to have that power. Of course, if you don't believe it, or if you think that that's not possible, or if you put your attention on it never being realizable, then of course it won't be. So as John Mundy was walking into Muktananda's ashram ashram, he was asked the question by Muktenanda, who was standing at the door of the ashram, "Do you know the difference between God and good?" And John said, "Yes, I do. Zero. One little O. There is no difference between God and the good." So now when I say the words, "I want to feel good," what I'm really saying is, "I want to feel God." And when you say, "I want to feel God," and you have launched this rocket of desire over here, but your thoughts are over and there's this huge imbalance between what it is you want to attract and what you think about all day long. Because you may be thinking about what's missing, and you may be thinking about what always has been, and you may be thinking about just what is. Look, one of the things that Maslow taught me as one of his students, as a very young man, as a doctoral student, was that self-actualizing people are people who never ever put their attention on on anything other than what they intend to create. That's the difference between people who live at ordinary consciousness and these highly functioning people, that you'll never hear them talk about or think about or contemplate within them the impossibility of things, the fact that it probably won't work out, the fact that I can't do it. And even if you're struggling with it, even let's say you're a person who wants to quit smoking, and there's several of you here, I've been watching, and you've been thinking about, uh, you know, you've launched the desire to, to quit smoking But your vibration is one on continuing to smoke. You're thinking about how difficult that will be, or how addicted you are, or what a struggle this is going to be, or whatever it might be. I would suggest to you that you stop yourself in the midst of all of this turmoil, inner turmoil, and this being out of harmony behavior of yours, and say to yourself, I want to feel good. I want to feel good, meaning I want to feel God. And as you shift into, I want to feel God, what happens is that you now are getting closer and closer to harmony, to an alignment with what it is that you want to create. And as you keep doing this, even if you continue to smoke, even if you continue to overeat, even if you continue to use substances that are harmful to you, even if you continue in relationships that don't work for you, even whatever it might be. If you say to yourself, but I want to feel good— try this the next time you have an upset stomach, try this the next time that you have a cramp, try this the next time that you feel out of sorts or that you have a headache. Try going within and saying, I want to feel good, I want to feel God. And use good and God as the same, and allow that energy to resonate. Watch, just watch, how as you shift your thought to an energy, to a vibration that is more in harmony with what it is that you would like to attract, that you then will get it. As Abraham says, whether you will get what you think about, whether you want it or not, you will get what you think about whether you want it or not. So once you realize how how important it is to think about what it is that is going to make you feel good, meaning feel God. This isn't saying I want to feel good, meaning I just want to have pleasure, pleasure, pleasure every moment of my life. It means I want to feel God at this moment. I want to get myself into harmony with that feeling. So we shift resistance. I want to share with you a beautiful poem that someone gave me just a few weeks ago, and it really is sort of my way of saying to you what will happen when you move not just to having your desires and what you think about become in harmony, but to then get to a place where you are with this thing called Source Energy. This thing called Source Energy is the highest energy in the universe. It's the energy that Saint Francis spoke about in his famous prayer: where there is hatred, let me bring love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. So that if you are in an energy of hatred or anger or fear or worry or any of these kinds of low, slow energies, and you can bring source energy that is, if you can align with source, which is oftentimes way beyond the energy or the vibration of whatever it is that you desire— if you can get to source energy, which is where you came from, then what happens is you begin to reflect this wherever you go. This is called the little sunbeam. When Billy needed answers to his questions, faith to replace his doubts, or love to soothe his fears, he would often visit his grandmother, who was said to have wisdom far beyond her years. On this particular occasion, Billy had attended attended the school earlier in the day. Perplexed by some of the concepts that were discussed, he wanted to see what Grandma would say. Billy said, Grandma, today we were taught that each of us was created in all of God's perfection, and that this concept is made clear when we realize that each of us is simply his reflection. My question is, if God created everything and everything he created was good, how do we explain bad? Grandma responded, responded, "That's an interesting question, Billy. In fact, when I was your age, it was the same one I had." You see, bad can exist in our thoughts only when we invent the false idea that we are separate from our Source. Since we are one with God, the only thing we can reflect is His perfection, of course. The secret is to remain steadfast in our thinking and not let our thoughts wander to and fro. To help you better understand, I'd like to share a story that I heard. Heard many years ago. After his first day on the job, a little sunbeam was asked by an older sunbeam, "How did you get along?" He answered, "It was hard. I had to dry the clothes on the line, ripen the tomatoes, and nourish the grass while I worried about what I might have done wrong." The older sunbeam said, "Well, young man, you are new at this, but before long you'll understand that you and your source are one. When that happens, this task will no longer be difficult." health, because you'll realize that all you have to do is reflect the sun. Isn't that beautiful? A little sunbathe. And for us, for me, it's getting to this beautiful place of being in harmony with our source at all times in our lives. And what is this source? Well, first of all, our source has an energy that we want to be hooked up with in all of our thoughts. Now keep this in mind, in all of your thoughts. So to me, the most important thing that Source teaches us is that we are all one and that the Source excludes no one. When Source is in the process of turning things from spirit to form, in that moment when a tiny little subatomic particle emerges Emerges from the source. Does it say you get some and you don't? You get to have— like tonight when you go to sleep and you look at your fingernails, you know that tomorrow morning they'll be just a little bit longer than they were the night before. And you know that there's a source, there's an energy, there's something that is going to grow those fingernails tonight. You're not going to go to bed tonight and say, you know, I don't want to forget to work on my fingernails because I've got to grow my fingernails tonight. Instead, you surrender, you let go, you allow. And in the process of allowing, you understand that it will also— well, for some of us— grow our hair and beat our hearts and digest our food and make whatever is necessary for this physical journey that I'm on to transpire and to take place. We all know that, and we trust in it, and we allow it. It's a mystery, it's magical. But what we forget sometimes is that the same source that allows us to have our fingernails grow every night and beat our hearts all night beats every heart on this planet. There's only one source. You cannot divide— the Course in Miracles says you cannot divide the all-encompassing. The all-encompassing is perfect oneness. You can't take oneness and divide it and get halfness. It's just oneness. So you can't divide it. So that all of us us share this same energy. Now, every single thought that you have that includes some and excludes another is a thought that takes you away from Source. Now, what's the problem with leaving Source? Problem with leaving Source is that when you leave Source in your thoughts, you lose the power of the Source. What is the power of the Source? You and it are one. It is the power to manifest It is the power to heal. It is the power to attract abundance. It is the power to feel good. It is the power to make other people feel good. It is the power to attract the right person and have synchronistic events show up. All of the things that we have the divine capacity to create. Again, one of those 10 secrets is to treasure your divinity. Treasure this idea that who you are. There's a book that was written back in the 1930s, a wonderful book. It's called Three Magic Words. You read the whole book, you get to the last page, and they still haven't told you the three magic words. It's about 250 pages long. It's a great book written in 1934, '35. And the three magic words are in the last paragraph: what? I am God. I am God. I came from a source, and whatever it is that creates— if it's perfect oneness that comes from this, then whatever it is that is creating emitting must also be perfect oneness. I am a piece of this, like the sunbeam, and it— all I have to do is reflect this. I just have to keep reflecting this. I may not be as big, I may not be as strong, I may not be omniscient, I may not be omnipresent, but I am that which emanated from this. Now you have a thought, and that thought is one that includes one and excludes others. One of the books I also bring with me to all of my talked, by a case or two, is called Power Versus Force, written by a man who was at this conference last year, a man that I have great reverence for. A weird guy, but I love weird guys. I love guys who live their life the way they want to live them. I like George Bernard Shaw. When they ask him why he wouldn't go to the derby, to the horse racing derby, they asked him, they kept begging, why won't you go? Why don't you go? He said, it is a known fact to me already that one Force can run faster than another. That was enough for him. Power Versus Force. If you look at the top of this book, it says perhaps the most important and significant book I've read in the past 10 years. And Power Versus Force is a book that Hawkins wrote that teaches us how to calibrate whether something strengthens us or weakens us. After reading this, I wrote the 10th secret in the 10 Secrets. It's called Wisdom to My Children. Wisdom is avoiding all thoughts which weaken you, and thoughts which weaken you are thoughts that calibrate below a scale of 1 to 1,000, below 200. And when you have on this scale— and he goes through it all, I'm not gonna— I don't have time tonight to go through it all, but Power Versus Force is a very, very, very powerful reading, something that I recommend all of you really dig into. And in here he calibrates— you can calibrate everything because he uses the body, which is a creation of Source, as an instrument of measurement to measure truth. So you get the mind out of the way and you just allow the body body, which can only react to truth with strength. And they calibrate, and they'll ask questions, and you use the body and you determine whether it weakens or strengthens you all the time. I first started learning about this from my dentist, Ira Wendroff, who, when I would be sitting in his chair and he was adjusting the occlusion on some crowns he was putting into my mouth, and then he'd get up and he'd say, "Get up out of the chair." I'd say, "What?" He'd say, "Get up out of the chair." And he'd stand up and he'd say, "Hold your arm out. Put your teeth together." And then he'd push down on my arm. I said, "What the hell kind of a dentist is this?" And if it would go weak, he'd sit me— and he's a weak guy himself, you know— and he'd push my arm down. I would have no strength. He said, it's not right.

And then he'd get me out.

And then when it was strong— and that's how he used it. Well, you can use this to measure whether something is going to strengthen you or weaken you. And surprise, surprise, when they take this thing called organized religion and they test it, they discover that organized religion as a concept always weakens us. It measures below 200, which is the level that will collectively weaken us. Why? Because anything that divides us weakens us collectively, and anything that unites us strengthens us. And guess what? You take a muscle test, the word spirituality— all of us are included as part of spirit, which is what the teaching of spirituality is—

and guess what?

Calibrates near 700.

600.

When someone calibrates their own body at 600 or above, when you walk into their energy field, illness disappears and dissolves. And I'll talk about that shortly.

So that—

and Jesus calibrated at 1,000, the only being in all the history of all of the things that are calibrated. And Hawkins spent 29 years of his life measuring these things at the calibration level of 1,000. That's called city consciousness or Christ consciousness. It's the place where there is no distinction and no time lapse between having a thought, a rocket of desire, a thought that you would like to attract, and having that desire manifest. It's called the gift of fish and loaves. You see hungry people, and because you are operating at the highest spiritual level from which all things emanate, the creative source of all things, you and it are one. There's no ego involved. Whatever it is that you think is there. And as you'll see when you read Ask and It Is Given, the Abraham book, as you see this, she'll discuss manifestation, or he'll— Abraham, whoever they are— will discuss this whole idea of how manifestation works, is that as your thought about what it is that you would like to attract moves more and more and more and more towards source energy, which excludes no one, includes all, as you do that, manifestation becomes easier and easier and easier and more relevant. And after a while, it's like your intuition begins to take over in your life. And it's all done through this process of shifting out of a thought that excludes one and includes another. So what kinds of thoughts? It's almost like trying to think like God thinks. And if you could think like God thinks, you would see that there would be no such thing as this debilitating thing that we've taken on called our ego.

Yes.

And what is this ego? The ego is an idea that we carry around. And this idea that we carry around says that who I am— see, we show up from source, perfect oneness. We show up from this source, perfect oneness. And then we're surrounded by all of these multiplicities of egos who are convincing us that who we are is what I call the 6 components of the ego. The first is that who I am is what I have. Now remember, we came from having nothing. We came from no thingness. Ness, no thingness, nothing. We show up here and we start getting trained into believing that if you're going to have value, you have to have some stuff. Now, that's a thought that is inconsistent with source energy. So the minute that you start thinking those kinds of thoughts, your vibration lowers and lowers. And the more you put the emphasis in your life on what you have and what you collect and what you get, the more you do that, the further and further away you you get from source, believe it or not. It's only in the process of letting go. I mean, in the recovery movement, we call this what? Letting go and letting God. Letting go and letting God. And as you let go and allow, you stop having so much of an attachment to what it is that you get. And as you have less and less of an attachment to what you get, it doesn't make any difference what kind of clothes you have, what kind of labels you wear, what kind of watch you have, what kind of car that you you have, or what kind of— that stuff stops being less and less and less relevant. And the irony of letting go of that and detaching and understanding that source is not about taking, it's about giving. One of the things that you learn in the power— what I learned in writing The Power of Intention is that whatever you feel is missing in your life, if you start wanting what it is that is missing in your life more for those in your life than you do for yourself, then you'll start attracting it for yourself. The ego says, I am what I have. The young lady that sat across from me at dinner last night told me about her father who suffers from a depression, and I asked her, I said, when did the depression start? She said, when he lost his job, and now he's on all kinds of antidepressants and he's dysfunctional because his job went away. The ego says not only I am what I have, and the with that conceptualization of I am what I have is that when what I have goes away, as it always will, as it always must, then who I am no longer exists. Remember, you are working at your thoughts being in harmony with Source. Rather than saying, what's in it for me, you want to say, how may I serve? Jung pointed out that we move through archetypes in our lives. And that as an adult, when we reach adulthood, the lowest archetype is what he called the archetype of the athlete, which is the time in our adult life when our primary emphasis is on our body and what it looks like and what it can do and how strong it is and how beautiful it is. And then he said you move up through the archetype of the warrior, which is the time in your adult life when you take your body out into the world. I'm talking about adults now. You go out into the world and you go and do what warriors do. And what do warriors do? Do? They fight and they collect and they compete and they evaluate who they are on the basis of who they're better than and how much more I have collected. And then he said, if you're growing, you move through the archetype of the statesman or the stateswoman, which is the time in our adult life when we stop saying, what are my quotas and what's in it for me? And we begin to say, what are your quotas and how may I serve? Supplants what can you do for me? Until ultimately Jung said, you reach the archetype of the spirit, which is what I'm heading here towards tonight. And that is when you get to the place where you recognize that who I am is not in this world. As Jesus said, you are in it, but you are not of it. You begin to understand what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great French priest, said, that you're not here as a human being having a spiritual experience. You're here as a spiritual being having a human experience. And when you get to this place where you're operating from Spirit, you try to have every thought that you have be in harmony with what it is I came from. And what it is I came from doesn't say that I am what I have, nor does it say I am what I do. The problem with I am what I do is with the, the— what I just spoke about with the depression is that if you are what you do, then when you don't, you aren't. You no longer are. You didn't come into this world doing anything except farting a little bit and, uh, you know, and blood-burying and just being goo goo. And we, we want to return to that. We look at babies, these sweet little things, and, you know, all they want to do is be on their mother's breast. I understand that. I'm 64 years old. You put a breast in my mouth for a couple of hours, I'm the happiest guy that ever lived. And, you know, what happens for so many of us is that we have a tendency to believe believe that when we're around low-energy people— this is the big cop-out in the spiritual community— is that it isn't me. You know, it's like, I don't really need to be here. The one who really needs to be here is— his ass is back at home, all right, watching a football game or whatever. But, uh, it's easy for you to stand up there and talk about spirituality and higher consciousness and all of that, but if you knew who I worked with, then you know who my boss was, or you knew who I was married to, or you know what I had to put up with, then it wouldn't be so easy for you to say. And I suggest to you that that's the time, that's the moments when you want to be able to say, nobody of lower energy can bring down a person of higher energy. The universe doesn't work that way. Low and slow energy, when confronted with higher and faster and more spiritual energy, is converted. If you're in a dark room, you're in a room of very low and very slow energy. When you're about to light a candle candle in a room that has total darkness in it, very low energy. As Abraham says, there's no source of darkness. You don't walk into a room and look for a switch for dark. There's only the absence of light. So that when you are about to bring light to the presence of darkness, you don't have to say, the darkness, you're going to have to scurry now. You got to get out of here because I'm going to bring some light here. What happens is you bring light to the presence of darkness and the darkness is dissolved. It's nullified, it disappears, right? But more than that, folks, it is converted to light. It's converted to light. So that if you want to— the same thing is true of what Francesco, what Saint Francis is saying in the prayer: where there is hatred, let me bring love. You put love in the presence of hatred, you not only get rid of the hatred, you change it to love. That's the message of source, that it is up to you to realign yourself with what I am. I am the source of all. Everything emanates from me. If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different than me, I will wait until you change your mind. And when you change your mind and you want to be like me, like source, all you say is, I want to feel good. I want to feel God. So now you're around a person person who has very low energy, and you find yourself being brought down by that low energy. It isn't because the low energy is dragging down your high energy. It's because you have joined the low energy with the same low energy responses that you have encountered. And you expand the energy field by hating the people who hate you, by getting angry at the people who will get angry at you, by getting depressed around the depressing people. And it doesn't do you any good when you say, I want to feel good. There's nothing wrong with feeling good, with feeling God, at any moment in your life, because you can't get sick enough to make somebody else get better, and you can't get sad enough to overcome anyone else's sadness. You can't get depressed enough to overcome depression. It doesn't make any difference if you choose to get depressed all day long around depressing people. You will not do anything other than create more It is your obligation to say in the face of those who bring you the most challenges, and God knows, I mean, this is one of the things you learn as a parent. It is, you know, when young children behave in hateful ways, when a child says, I hate you, Mommy, I hate you, Mommy, you don't say, you hate me? Well, I hate you even more than you hate me. What do you think of that? You laugh because it's so absurd. This is where you have to be able to be in a place where you can send love out in response to that anger, response to that hate, and elevate it. If you're at peace, if you're connected to Source, if you're one of those people who sees the world as a friendly place rather than an unfriendly place, then you'll be able to attract it anywhere. There are people— here's a great story, sort of personifies the difference between people who see the world in the kind of way I'm trying to get you to see it, or people who see it the reverse. A New York woman was at her East Side hairdresser's getting her hair styled prior to a trip to Rome with her boyfriend. She mentioned the trip to the hairdresser who responded, "Rome? Why would anyone want to go to Rome? It's crowded, it's dirty, and worse yet, it's full of Italians. You're crazy to go to Rome." "So how are you going to be getting there?" She said, "Well," she said, "we're flying on Continental Airlines. We got this great rate." "Continental? That's a terrible airline." You know this lady, she moves around a lot. Their planes are old, their flight attendants are They're always late. So where are you going to be staying while you're in Rome? Well, we're going to be at this exclusive little place over on Rome's left side. It's called Testa. Don't go any further. I know that place. It's a dump. Everybody thinks it's going to be something special and exclusive, but it's really terrible. The worst hotel in the whole city. The rooms are small, the service is surly, and they're way overpriced. So what are you going to be doing when you get there? Well, we're going to the Vatican, and, uh, we were kind of hoping to see the Pope. Yeah, right, the Pope. You and a million other people. If you do see him, he'll look like the size of an Boy, good luck to you on this lousy trip of yours. You're really gonna need it. So the woman leaves, and a month later she comes back for her hair appointment, and the hairdresser asked her about her trip to Rome, and she's all smiles. She says, well, it was absolutely wonderful. Not only did we arrive on time in a brand new jet, but it was overbooked and they bumped us up to first class. The food and the wine were wonderful, and I had a handsome 28-year-old steward who waited on me hand and foot. And the hotel, fabulous. They just finished a $5 million remodeling job, and now it's a jewel, the finest hotel in the city, and they too were overbooked, so they apologized and gave us their owner's suite at no extra charge. Well, said the hairdresser, that sounds good, but I know you didn't get to see the Pope. She said, actually, this is where we really got lucky, for just as we were touring the Vatican, a Swiss guard tapped me on the shoulder and exclaimed that the Pope sometimes, on occasion, likes to personally meet some of the visitors, and if I would be so kind as to step into his private room and wait, the Pope would personally like to greet me. Can you imagine Imagine? And sure enough, 5 minutes later, the Holy Father himself walked through the door and shook my hand. And I knelt down, and he actually spoke a few words to me in my ear. You're kidding! What did he say? He said, where'd you get that lousy hairdo? Don't you just love that? Isn't there— not supposed to like revenge, but there's something about that. Is one of the things that Joel Goldsmith observed in The Infinite Way back in the '60s was that that the material laws do not apply in the face of the God-realized. That all of the rules and laws, the laws of cause and effect, the laws of abundance, the laws of things that you think you have to have in order to make things work, the laws of healing that you have to go through certain processes in order to be healed— in the presence of the God-realized, said Goldsmith, these laws that you have come to think of as hardcore laws simply don't apply, even the laws of gravity and all these other rules. So it's like, as you move towards letting go of ego and not evaluating yourself on the basis of who I am and what I have— rather, and what I do and what other people think of me, that is my reputation— and you shift instead to an awareness that source is always Always kind. One of the things I spoke about in the last PBS special is the research on kindness that shows that when a person is the recipient of an act of kindness, their serotonin levels— that is, the enzyme in the brain that antidepressants are designed to stimulate, the feel-good enzyme— the higher the serotonin, the better you feel. So that when serotonin is increased, you have that good joyful feeling. All right. And when a person is the recipient of an act of kindness, their serotonin levels rise. And the person who offers an act of kindness— that is, if you offer someone else an act of kindness and they accept it— not only does the person who receives the act of kindness have their serotonin levels increased, but so too does the provider of the act have it in the same measure. And And the most intriguing thing of all of that is that the observers, those who observe an act of kindness, just being in the energy field of someone receiving or giving kindness raises your serotonin level to the same extent as the people in the process themselves. Doesn't there seem to be a solution in there for all of us? I mean, how many of you have ever watched this show? It's one of Serena's, one of her favorite shows called Extreme Makeover. No, I don't mean the face thing. I mean the houses, you know.

What is it called?

Trading Spaces? No, no, not— oh, Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Is that it? Did I do that right? Is that right?

Huh?

Well, Miss Smartass correcting your father on stage. You watch that show and you can't help but feel good, can you? I mean, you see the people come home and everybody, I can't believe it. Oh my God, look at that! Isn't that what the show is? And you're sitting there in your living room. Oh my God. Oh, that feels so good. Oh, that feels— right? We need to do this in Fallujah, not drop bombs. Seriously, we need to do it everywhere. A set of tapes Deepak Chopra and I put together a few years ago called Creating Your World the Way You Really Want It to Be. In those tapes, we talked about where they did this experiment with 7,000 people meditating, and they were able to, through the process of meditation measuring serotonin levels again of people who meditate. Now we know people who meditate, it makes you feel good. You know, Marcy meditates every day. I'm a meditator. I've written a book about it, Getting in the Gap, put out CD about it. I've been teaching it for many years. When you meditate, you feel good because you connect to God, as you'll see in a few moments. When you connect to God, that's when you feel good, because good and God are the same. It's not about pleasure. It's about feeling feeling God. All right, then they would measure the people in the immediate community who were just in the same community but didn't even know the meditators were there. And they were measuring serotonin levels and finding that people who were in the immediate vicinity were having their serotonin levels raised just because they were in the same space as people who were meditating. That's the solution to the Middle East, it seems to me. It's like, let's just surround the place with people who are meditating. Let's put 15 million people and make them meditate. Golda Meir put it beautifully. She said, there will never be peace in the Middle East until the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate the Jews. And the same thing is true in reverse— until we learn to love our children and each other more, to do what Jesus said, to pray for those who would use you and persecute you first before you pray for your brother, to find that within ourselves. I want to see the candidates say that. Guess what? They will come out of this consciousness. The ego also speaks about separation. There is no separation. If you look at— I've been taking notes all day from A Course in Miracles— of the two seeming worlds, the world of God and the world of man, only the world of God is true. And God doesn't interact with the false world. The source that you want to reach and work for you in your life, it's called the experience of God. I love this bathroom book. It's one more of the books that I bring with me at my talks. Myself, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Louise Hay, Ram Dass, Bernie Siegel, Scott Peck, Joan Borzenko, and 30 or so others wrote about the experience of God. I call it a bathroom book because if you put it in your bathroom and replace the low energy that is leaving, the higher energy of spirit— in the remaining moments that I have, I would like to just go through quickly and then have Skye close us out with amazing Grace. I would like to go through quickly what I think of as the 5 most important lessons that you can have in communing with Source. This is what I know I think I'll be writing about because it just seems to keep coming to me. As you approach Source, whether you call it prayer, meditation, as you approach Source, it is important for you to understand first and foremost, and this is one of the most difficult and most easily open to misinterpretation, as Abraham says, if If there's nothing you can do about it, then it's not about you. Again, if there's nothing you can do about it, then it's not about you. Now you watch the news and an event that has already taken place, there's nothing you can do about it, is there? Then it's not about you. Now the reason I say this, and I don't want you to misinterpret this, is this: Hawkins speaks over and over in Power Versus Force about force always creating a counterforce. When you see an event take place, that is a train being blown up and 197 people are killed in Spain, or yesterday 31 more people killed over there, 10 more soldiers over there the day before, people blowing themselves up, blowing their children up to make a point. When you see this kind of stuff, you see this kind of stuff, what does it make you feel? You feel bad, don't you? When you feel bad, you attract the energy of what it is that you are feeling. Like it or not, you will get whatever you think about. You will get whether you want it or or not, you will get it, whatever you're thinking about. So if you're thinking about how much you hate the people in the world who would do such despicable things, and you fill yourself with the same energy that they are sending to you, you have now magnified the amount of low energy in the world. It is incumbent upon you, if you're approaching Source, to say, I intend to feel good, meaning I intend to feel at any moment. And if enough of us were to collectively reach that critical mass where we say, I refuse to be depressed, I refuse to be upset, I refuse to be in a state of anger and terror because there is that in the world, instead I intend to feel good— if enough of us do it and we reach a critical mass, they'll stop reporting it. Now, if you understood that when they blow up trains and they have all of these kinds of beheadings and so many of the things that you watch that are so horrifying to you, as you watch them and you get filled with the same hatred that they send you, you are falling right into the trap. The force, counterforce, force. And now, of course, we have people who say, let's go kill them all. We have to kill more of them. We have to kill more of them. And as we do that, we create more people who want to kill more. And it's this endless cycle, which is the story of world history, the amount of people that we kill and how we kill them and so on. If, on the other hand, let's just say that they put these kinds of things out out there and nobody reported it. It just didn't get reported because we put our attention on what the world the way we want it to be rather than on the kinds of things that we don't want to have in our life. And it didn't get reported. Then they did it again and they did it again and it didn't get reported. How long do you think this behavior would continue? The only way you can do something about the things that are going on in the world that you find so despicable is to feel good after you are made aware of it and to keep yourself— for God's sake, at 11 o'clock at night, don't turn on the local news, which is designed to have you feel bad. When you feel bad, you align with an energy that attracts bad into your life. That's just the law of attraction. That's just the way the universe works. And you'll see that when you read Ask and It Is Given. So if there's nothing you can do about it, you didn't sign up for that. You signed up to be feeling God, and that's what you feel. And if enough of us do it, we will transcend this kind of negativity, this kind of hatred, this kind of low energy that is out out there. That's the first. I could do an hour on that, okay? I can only have a few moments. The second of these, and I think this is probably the most important in terms of your own personal lives, is to remember that God, Source, cannot be anything other than what it is. It can't be what it isn't. Now, what is it? It is abundance. It is well-being. Let's just take those two. It's many other things. It's non-exclusion, which I talked about earlier. Every thought that you have that includes you and excludes anybody else. It's why all the talk of our race and our country— God bless America calibrates at about 181. God bless humanity calibrates over 600. I wonder why. I wonder why. The whole idea of this source, let's just say it's well-being, and let's just say it is abundance. Now you come to it with a thought that is not of God. That thought is, I have scarcity in my life. And that thought is I have illness in my life. So now you get down on your knees and you say, please heal me of my illness. And you say, please send me my abundance, my money, whatever it is, because I've got scarcity. But now this source, which can only be what it is, how can it recognize what it isn't? Listen to these words from the Course: because your idea is not of God, God does not respond to it. To respond to it would give it reality. God say? If God were to respond to anything other than the idea of perfect oneness, there would no longer be perfect oneness. Does that make sense? So you can't go to God and ask God, which is perfect abundance, to replace your scarcity because it doesn't know anything about scarcity. And you can't ask it to heal you because it knows nothing about illness because it is nothing but well-being. All of our illnesses, all of them, are collectively from generations upon generations upon eons of egos that have convinced themselves that they're not living in a state of perfect health regardless. And death is not even entered into it, because death is not a punishment. It's not even a reflection of illness. It is just all that composes decomposes, and you just return, take off. As William Butler Yeats said, an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul claps its hands and sings and louder sings for every tatter in its mortal dress. We're just tattered coats on a stick unless we understand that our reality is that we are already abundant. We are already— so if you want to, and Abraham will explain this to you so beautifully, if you want to attract this into your life, you say, make me an instrument of thy well-being. Let me summon the abundance that I originated from, that I have forgotten, instead of saying please replace it. It cannot react to that which it isn't. Okay, third, source and returning to source and gaining the power of the source and the power of intention is not about learning something new. You're not going to get it here. You're not going to get it in books and tapes and so on. You might get some clues, but you're not going to get it that way. It's about remembering. It's about remembering. The ego is the part view that's separated from Source and believes in its separation, and also believes in all that it owns and all that it does and all that its reputation reflects. But you must learn to remember. And here's what the Course says about remembering: the remembrance of God comes to the quiet mind. A mind at war with itself remembers not eternal gentleness. What you remember is who you are, for you You must be as God created you. Be done with this madness and return instead to the quiet memory of God. Just remember who you are and where you came from. All the rest of this is illusion. All of it is illusion. You have a choice of finding your way through the veils of forgetfulness back to where you belong. It's about remembering. When you're struggling, remember. When you're You're sick, remember you are well-being and reach for a thought that is in harmony with well-being. Fourth, source knows. Don't ever assume that source forgets. Every dog, every cat, every raccoon, every rat, every animal that has fur on it, when winter comes, even before winter gets here, even when it's still fall and still summer, what happens to your horse and to your dog and to your cat and to your rats. What happens to their fur? It starts to what? It starts to expand and get stronger, doesn't it? And get thicker. Everyone— it never forgets a rat. Now you go down to South— I was down in Australia in August, and I went to a dingo farm. And at the dingo farm— this is those wild dogs that they have there— it was August. Now August is summer up here, but in the Southern Hemisphere, August is what? It's winter. So after winter comes spring. So the dingoes are starting to have their coats thin out a bit. August. So I say to the guy down there, I said, supposing we took these dingoes and we put a group of them on a Qantas jet and we see if we could just fool Source and we ship them up to Quebec where it's just about to be winter, but down here it's heading, you know, the other way around. He said, we do that all the time. I said, well, what happens when they get to those northern climates? He said, it's amazing. Suddenly, instead of having their coat get smaller, it starts getting thicker when they get off the plane. If Source can remember remembered dingoes on a quantum jet heading from Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere. How could you ever assume it could forget you? It never forgets. It never forgets. Source always knows. Don't presume to tell it something or that it's forgotten. What you're going through, what struggles you're having, what's missing, are all because you have aligned with that kind of thinking. And finally, when you approach Source Source, approach it with an awareness that it doesn't need you to love it. God doesn't need you to love God. God isn't worried, in my opinion, and I have the mic. God doesn't worry about whether or not you bring images that are false to it or not, because if they did come, and everything comes from Source, it would be a laughing matter, wouldn't it? I created that so you could just have a little fun. God doesn't need you to love it, doesn't you to build temples for it. God doesn't need you to chant to it. God doesn't need you to love God. God, I believe, Source, the way that you show your love for Source is by taking the love that you emanated from and loving each other. Share, give. Source is for giving. It doesn't need to take. It doesn't need you to turn back and love it. The way that you show your love for God is to extend that love that is God, that is you, everywhere. This is the way I closed out The Power of Intentions on the PBS show. A 92-year-old petite, well-poised, and proud lady who's fully dressed every morning by 8 o'clock with her hair fashionably coiffed and her makeup perfectly applied, even though she's legally blind, moved to a nursing home today because her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the library of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when when she was told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker towards the elevator, she's provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on the window. "I love it," she states with the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old boy having just been presented with a brand new puppy. "But, but Mrs. Jones, you haven't even seen the room yet. Just wait, just wait." "That doesn't have anything to do with it," she replied. "Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn't depend on how the furniture's it's how I arrange my mind. You see, even if you're a 92-year-old legally blind lady, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And my final message to you is right out of the Course, something I practice and study and look at each day of my life. In every moment of your life, you have this choice: you can either be a host to God or a hostage to your ego.

So I want to talk in the last the last hour and a half or so that we have tonight on a way of manifesting and attracting things into your life that is virtually fail-safe based upon the teachings of U.S. Anderson and Neville Goddard. You may not have heard of them before, but you will be soon. And I also want to speak about my own journey and some of the things that have been going on with me. And I'd like to start with the idea that any of you that are here would come to a conference called celebrate your life and invest your time and your, and your money and your energy into, uh, a weekend such as this with so many great powerful teachers that are here. I'm, uh, proud to be among them and humbled by it. But I don't think that you would be here if there wasn't a part of you someplace inside of you that wanted to elevate your life in some way, to get to a higher place, whatever it might be, that there might be some sense of inner, uh, Recognition perhaps that where you are is fine, but where you would like to go and where you would like to be and what your dharma might be, what your purpose on this planet is, it may elude you just a little bit. Or you may feel that there's more, there's something else that I'm here for. So that in order to change and elevate your life, if we use this as ordinary levels of consciousness, this place here that I'll be using my hand to just demonstrate when I speak about about just being at an ordinary level of consciousness, being able to fulfill your life and things are all right. But there's another level of consciousness, super consciousness. In India they call it Siddhi consciousness. In the Middle East they call it Christ consciousness or God consciousness or God realization. It's a place where you begin to recognize your own divinity. And from that place, as it says in the New Testament, all things are possible. With God, all All things are possible. And being able to go from here to here means that you have to change your concept of yourself. And this is not something that comes easy. In fact, in this room, there's probably 2,000 people or so here tonight. There are only a handful that will actually do it. A lot of people will pay lip service to it, and I'm one. I mean, I've paid lip service to it a lot in my life, and now finally, in my 7th decade, I'm beginning to understand it. Neville said that, uh, in order to understand or learn something mentally, you have to think about it. You have to cogitate on it. You have, uh, you contemplate it. That's the process of learning something mentally. In order to learn something spiritually, you must experience it. It's not enough to just think about it and analyze it. In fact, analyzing it usually keeps you from doing it. It's that sense of being able to live it and to know it. So your concept of yourself that you brought into this room tonight is everything that you believe to be true about yourself and about this life that you live. Everything that you believe to be true. So just think on this for a second. Everything that you believe to be true about yourself got you to here, to ordinary level of consciousness, or a place where you would like to get a little higher. So in order to get here, you have to change some things that you've come to believe are true, like who you are and what your capacities are and what is possible for you and what you can and can't accomplish, what the world is. It's like making those shifts. And these shifts are things that have been planted in you from the time that you were little boys and little girls. We call them prompters, or we call them memes. M-E-M-E. Interesting word. It's like a, it's like a virus that's placed in you when you're a little boy or a little girl. And like most viruses, that, uh, you know, like if you think of a virus in a computer or a virus in your body, body medically, a virus is, um, has 3 functions. Its first function is to duplicate itself. That's what a virus does. It just likes itself so much, it just makes another one, just keeps duplicating itself and duplicating itself. And it also— purpose, second purpose is to infiltrate, so that any place that there's an opening, as it duplicates, it also enters there. And the third purpose of a virus is to spread from one host to the next host to the next host to the the next host. Duplicate, infiltrate, spread. And if you know anything about computer viruses, you know that's exactly what happens. They duplicate, duplicate fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. Any place that there's an opening in the computer, it goes. And then if there's another computer that it can get into, off it goes, and we've got a virus. Same thing happens with a virus in your body. So those are things that we can look through a microscope and look at and say, okay, that's a virus. But there are other viruses that we call mind viruses. And a mind virus is, has the exact same purpose. Its purpose is to duplicate, infiltrate, and spread. And they really do spread, these ideas, particularly about our limitations and who we are. So making that shift is what I want to talk about somewhat here tonight— changing our concept of ourself and changing what is true, what we believe is true. I came across something that I haven't told in a long time, and I thought I'd read it to you tonight. It was— they had a conference, I think I think it was in Salt Lake City, and there was a woman there, her name was Portia Nelson. And they were all told to write their biography of their life, but they had to do it on 3x5 cards, and they could only do 5. So they had to tell their whole life story in 5 3x5 cards, 5 chapters. And this is what Portia wrote. Chapter 1 of my life: I walk down the street, there's a deep hole in the sidewalk, I fall in, I am lost, I'm helpless. It isn't my fault, it It takes forever to find a way out. Chapter 2: I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place, but it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. Chapter 3: I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I still fall in. It's a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault, and I get out immediately. Chapter 4: of my life. I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Chapter 5. I walk down another street. Not good. Now I want to tell you a story. I was so blessed in 1978. I was 38 years old. I had two huge best-selling books that were international hits. One was called Your Erroneous Erroneous Zones, which a lot of you took home in brown paper bags. I walked into an airport in Des Moines, Iowa when I was on a book tour, and they had all of the books over here, and then they had the sort of the pornography section over here, and they had a whole bunch of books like Do Me, Do Me, Do Me and The Pizza Man Always Delivers or something. I don't know what it was. And there was my face smiling away, Your Erroneous Zones, you know, right in the middle. So whoever was putting the books in there I thought then. I remember another time in, uh, speaking in Houston, Texas, and the speaker, the guy who was introducing me, introduced me this way by telling the story of, uh, he said last night, he said, I was at home and my wife was upstairs and I glanced at what she was reading and I looked in there. I thought, hmm, this is going to be a good night. And, uh, he said, I went into the bathroom and I got my banaca and I did put the deodorant and took a shower, and I got into bed next to her, and she started talking to me about my attitude. He said, it wasn't what I had in mind at all. At any rate, that book was followed by a book called Pulling Your Own Strings. And because these books were so well received, I was invited to go to Vienna, Austria, for a group, an organization called YPO, Young Presidents Organization. And it's an organization of presidents of companies. You have to be under the age of 50, and you have to have more than, I think, I don't know, 200 employees or something like that. I don't remember all the details, but, uh, and they put on these universities. They don't pay you for speaking, they just invite you to these fabulous things. And I remember at this one in 1978, Walter Mondale was one of the speakers. He was on— I was on with him. And, um, you know, they bring lots of, uh, high-profile people from all over the world, and it's really just— and they take you and they just treat unbelievably. They actually rented a whole town in Austria for the night. At any rate, I was put on a panel with two other people. One of them, her name was Virginia Satir. She was a family therapist, very, very famous family therapist. And the other person I was put on the panel with was— it just shocked me. I was in such awe that I didn't even feel like I belonged in the same city with this man, let alone being on a panel and having discussions and talking to these presidents of corporations from all over the world. His name was Viktor Frankl. Now, when I was a doctoral student, 8 years before that, we used Man's Search for Meaning as a textbook to try to teach people something called logotherapy, to help people to find meaning in their life. And this was a man who was a psychiatrist in Germany, in Berlin, and he was lifted out of there and put put into Auschwitz in Poland as a concentration camp victim for the next 6 years. And he survived because he had to tell the story, and he knew he had to tell the story, and he was keeping notes and smuggling things out. And, and I remember that at that, I just sat there in awe with my mouth open that I could even be, like I say, on the same panel with this man that had been through so much. And was such a hero to me. And not only that, but I studied his work. It was like last week again, like last week when I was speaking there, there was Ram Dass sitting over there in his wheelchair taking notes on what I was saying. There's still just a little orphan boy in here that can't quite even comprehend that you're all here, because I have 8 kids and they don't listen to anything I say. There's a lot of humility in me, I promise you. And Viktor Frankl said you had to— and he said something to me after that I've never forgotten. He said, when you find yourself in life in situations in which you can't do anything about the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. And he said, that's what I had to do. And he told the story of them bringing a bowl of dirty water with a floating fish head, a dead fish head in dirty water, and that was to be his meal for the day. And he, just thinking about it, he was able to find meaning and beauty in this floating fish head. And he said the people who he worked with as a psychiatrist, working with the, uh, and he was of course getting, losing weight and getting smaller and smaller and wasting away himself. And he told how people would believe that they were going to be liberated on a certain day, like April the 30th, 1944. And they had set that in their mind that they would be liberated that day, and that day would come and they wouldn't be liberated, and the next day they would be dead. And he said on the death certificate it always said they died of tuberculosis or whatever it was, but he said they died because they lost meaning. They lost their sense of what I'm here for. This talk has been called From Ambition to Meaning. It was the title of my film, The Shift, originally, Ambition to Meaning. I changed it to the shift because I think we can shift the whole consciousness of this planet. And I believe that just this number of people, if we could get that shift underway, we could reverberate that out and make a huge, huge difference in this world. So, um, when I left Vienna, I communicated with Dr. Frankl for a while, and I've never forgotten this whole notion of being able to, uh, help someone to find this thing called meaning. And as a young doctoral student in my 20s, I was also blessed to be a student of Abraham Maslow. Dr. Maslow passed away on the 17th of June in 1970, the same day that I walked across the stage at Cobble Hall in Detroit and was handed my doctoral degree. And it was almost as if he handed me a baton and he said that I've explained this concept of elevated consciousness— he called it self-actualization I've explained it to the academic world. If you've read Toward a Psychology of Being, or— and most of you know about the Pyramid of Maslow and studied him and so on. Well, he said when you get this— and he knew that we were in training to become therapists— that if you ever really want to reach a person that you want to help, if you're in the helping professions, or if you're a parent, or if you're a priest, or if you're a teacher, or a counselor, or psychologist, psychiatrist, whatever it might be, if you really want to reach another human being, he said, when you sit down to talk to them, don't talk to them about their problems. Don't spend more than a minute or two on their problems, because you become what you think about, whether you want it or not. And he used to say that therapy is for better or for worse, that if you're operating at a lower level of self-actualization than the person you're attempting to help or to heal, then you will not only not help that person, you will keep them from being able to grow. You will be doing them a disservice by just being in their presence and speaking to them about their problems. And we used to say, what, what, what do you mean? And he would say, get them to focus on what they want to become, that self-actualizing people never place their attention on what they don't want or what they can't do. They're not even wired together that way. They They're wired together in a very different way, a way that's very difficult to explain. But, and I didn't know that I was going to be talking about this right now because I just know that I don't deliver the speeches, that God writes all the books and delivers all the speeches and builds all the bridges. And this is what I'm supposed to talk about for a little while tonight. Paramahansa Yogananda used to open his talks by saying this: Shh, shh, listen. Can you hear the music? He would say, can you hear the music? It's playing, it's playing. Why can't you hear it? Oh, give someone over there a radio and turn it to 96.5, and the music plays. And give someone over here one, and it's 91.3, and you'll hear the music playing. There's music playing all over the place, but we can't hear it. Now take that radio and open it up and see if you can find the music in there. There's no music in that radio. He said, that's how God God is. You just can't hear it because you're not aligned. And the minute that you align, you'll hear it all. And boy, I'll tell you, I've never forgotten that. I wasn't blessed to ever be with Paramahansa Yogananda, but I read everything about him and all of his teachings. Passed away when I was a young man. When I was in my doctoral program, we had a professor there. His name was Fritz Riedel. R-E-D-E-L. He was probably the most popular professor on the campus. This is at Wayne State University. I had my kids all convinced for years that they named that thing after me. I did. They used to even tell their friends, no, really, really honest, no, really, you know, I'm not kidding you, man. I'm telling you, my dad had a university named after him.

It used to be the Detroit City College and they named it—

I'd have this great story going with them. Anyway, it was a very large university in the center of Detroit, 45,000 students. There's a medical school there and so on. But Fritz Radel Evan Carmichael was— and he's the one who brought Maslow to the university and how I got to be involved in Maslovian teaching. And he had a seminar that only doctoral students could get into, but even getting into it, he had a class that he taught on Tuesday evenings, every Tuesday from like 7 to 9 o'clock, and there were more people in the class than there are in this room. And just getting in, I mean, everybody wanted to sign up for it, and he would come in and he would tell— he knew Viktor Frankl. He was from Austria himself, and he was funny and fun, and you automatically got a minimum of a B just by being in his class. Another reason 2,000 people were always in the class. But more than that, just being in his presence, he was just such a beautiful, great teacher. And I always wanted to get to know him more because I took the one class. When I got into the doctoral program, there were only 6 of us, and they would do it by lottery. Lottery because it would be like 40 doctoral students and there were only room for 6. And I got in. I really think that my advisor, Dr. Mildred Peters, I think she pulled some strings and got me in. I can feel Mildred Peters right here, right now. She has to be dead because she was about 70 and that was 1966 or '67. So anyway, I feel her. I just see her. She's a great guide for me. I'll tell you more about her later. So we're in the seminar and it's every Thursday in, it's 3 hours. And it goes 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock. And we each do cases. We have patients that we're working with, clients that we're working with, and we're doing case studies. And we would go in and we would read them, and then, um, he would discuss them and talk about— and we would do tapes and he would analyze the tapes. And it was just— it was just so— no, nobody ever missed his class. And he gave us our grades on the first day. Everybody got an A. This is a little doctoral program toward the very end of it. So there was no issue about doing this because we were going to have some external reward. That was all handled for us. And he came in one evening and he laid this out. He said, we talked about self-actualization a lot, and I'll be talking about it tonight, obviously. And he said that a self-actualized man arrives at a dinner party and there are several hundred people there, and they're all dressed in black tie semi-formal attire, or suits and ties and dresses and so on. And a self-actualized man arrives at the dinner party and he's wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, baseball hat, and sneakers. What does he do? And he walks out of the room. He said, you have 15 minutes, this is your exam, midterm. I was 28 years old. I just was so full of myself and so certain that I would pass this one easily. And I wrote furiously about how he wouldn't leave and he wouldn't pay attention to it and he wouldn't apologize for it and he would feel confident within himself and he wouldn't be letting anybody judge him on the basis of what he wore and so on. And Fritz came back into the room and had each of us read our answer and each one of us read it out loud, 15 minutes of writing, couple of pages, and he slammed his folder, he had this manila folder with all these papers He said, "You don't know a goddamn thing, any of you." He walked out of the room like he was angry at us. Then he came back a couple minutes later and he said, "None of you got it right." He said, "You only needed 3 words: he wouldn't notice. He wouldn't notice." This is how these people are wired together, in such a way that appearances and how a person is dressed or what they look like passes by because Maslow said there are 4 characteristics of a person. Characteristics or qualities of self-actualizing people? Well, there's actually 37, and if you read a book I wrote many years ago called The Sky's the Limit, it's all about that. And a book that I wrote about how to raise children to become self-actualized children called What Do You Really Want for Your Children, it's based on what I learned about self-actualization. They're 25 years old or, or more. But the top 4 qualities of self-actualization were: the first was to become independent of the good opinion of other people, that this is what self-actualizers do. They don't run their life on the basis of, um, what anybody else might think or say. They are independent of, uh, any consideration about what other people might do, and they cause a lot of problems because of that. And they can't be dissuaded from their vision of who they are and what they're for. They are fulfilling their own dharma. They're not trying to fulfill someone else's idea of what their dharma should be. Be or not be. And dharma is just a word for— it's in the movie, but it's just a Sanskrit word for purpose, if you will. This is what you're here for. Meaning. When you're aligned with meaning. In The Shift, at the end, I quoted my friend Joel Goldsmith. My friend. I never met him, but he lived on Maui, and I've always thought of him as my friend. And the reason that I think of of them is my friend is because Alexandra, who's now 94 I believe, dated him on Maui. And I've, and I've been over at her home so many times. And, uh, oh, I got to put glasses on for this. He wrote, uh, many, many books. Joe Goldsmith, A Parenthesis in Eternity, is what I'm quoting from here, that your life is just a parenthesis in eternity. He said, then there are those who reach a stage in which they realize the futility of this constant striving struggling for the things that perish, things which after they are obtained prove to be shadows. It is at this stage that some persons turn from this seeking for things in the outer realm to a seeking for them from God. And I wrote that in there at the end of this companion book to the movie. This business of being independent of the good opinion of other people is something that, um, I guess I was blessed because that's pretty much the way I've always run my life. I wrote this book for my teenage children because I kept a diary for years of the 10 most important ideas or thoughts that I had carried around. And one of the first ones I did when I was 19, and I've told this story before, I'm not going to tell it again, but it was basically, don't die with your music still in you. Don't get to the end of your life and— I used to say this to myself when I would be playing tennis. I used to play tennis tournaments and I'd find myself being cautious and careful and hanging back, you know, just especially when I'd get ahead and get close to the end of it and just want to just put this person away and getting that tentative. And you can feel that, and you see it in competitive athletics a lot. And I used to say to myself what I had written in there about don't die with your music still in you, that, uh, don't die wondering. I should remind myself of that. I had that sometimes. I would take that out into the tournament and I'd have it in my pocket, and when I would change sides, I'd reach in there stand there and say, "Now, damn it." Don't die wondering, you know, whether you could win this match or not. Don't die by playing tentative. Hit the damn ball, and if it goes out, it goes out. You'll at least know. Don't— and I say that to you, all of you, not just in tennis matches, but about everything in your life. You came here from a place in ambition, in the shift from ambition to meaning. There's 4 chapters: From, Ambition, To, and Meaning. And I'll talk a little bit about them tonight. But From is like, where did we come from? And that's been a really big theme for me lately. T.S. Eliot said that we shall not cease from exploration, but at the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place from which we originated, but to know it for the first time. To know it. And he was talking about death, but I'm not. I think we can know it, where we came from, if we align ourselves with our dharma, with our purpose, with God, and begin to live from a God-realized place. I was down in Australia just recently, and they asked me on the equivalent of The Tonight Show down there, what is your mission? What is your mission? What are you here for? And I immediately responded, I would like to live a God-realized life. I would like to understand what Einstein meant when he said, I don't care about the details of quantum physics. Physics. He said, "All I want to do is learn to think like God thinks." How does God think? And who is God? But I'll have the answer for that for you before you leave tonight. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? It is. You'll be surprised. So we have this purpose, this mission, and being independent of the good opinion of other people is like just all-out crucial. I mean, I can't even imagine— that's why Maslow labeled it "always first," because because so many of us are attempting to live a dharma that has been laid out for us by other people, and therefore we always lack passion. And without passion, you know, the, the word for enthusiasm breaks down in Greek to the God within. If you don't have enthusiasm, entheos, if you don't have that, you are doing what somebody else has laid out for you, or what you've been told is the right thing to do, or why you're supposed to do it. And if you don't listen to that calling of yours, that thing inside of you that says, but this is what you're here for, and you have to fulfill it. And you can't pay attention to whether anybody else agrees with it or likes it or dislikes it or thinks it's right or wrong or proper or improper. You have to be a scurvy elephant. I've told this story so many times it's become identified with me. People send me little elephants that are really scurvy looking from all over the world. But when I was— I lived in an orphanage until I was 10, and then my mom got us all back together together again because my father just walked out on us when I was born, right after I was born. I was the youngest of 3, and I came home from school the first day, the Wednesday after Labor Day was when we started school, and I heard Mrs. Poole telling the principal that Wayne Dyer was in her classroom and that he was a scurvy elephant. And so I, I got home and I asked Mrs. Scarf, what's a scurvy elephant? And she said she'd never heard it. Where did you hear that? And I told her, and she got on the telephone and she called the principal and Mrs. Smith And she said, oh, that's Wayne. He gets everything mixed up. She didn't say that he was a scurvy elephant in her classroom. She said that he was a disturbing element in her classroom. And you have to be a scurvy elephant. You have to be someone who's willing to, you know, I mean, it's just such an old line from Hamlet, to be or not to be. It's just, but it's just a great question, isn't it? You know, am I going to or am I not going to be? But what follows that is even more profound, whether it is nobler in the minds of men to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and thus by opposing end them. That's your choice, whether you're going to be or not to be. Whenever I fly on an airplane, I always ask for seat 2B. Always I do. You see me on a plane and it's open, I get 2B. I could go to or not to be, but I don't, I go to to be. So I urge you, I mean, if you're thinking self-actualization, you're thinking of that pyramid, you're thinking of that, you know, that little section of the pyramid at the end, down here at the base of the pyramid is just fulfilling your basic needs and taking care of them and handling them, and then your needs for belonging and your needs for love and your needs for family. But up here, up here at the top, Maslow called this self-actualization. And those people are, They're like Thoreau. I mean, Thoreau wrote an essay at Walden Pond on the necessity of civil disobedience after going to jail and refusing to pay his taxes in 1843 in Concord, Massachusetts, because he said that anybody who pays their taxes to a country who is— this was our Holocaust. This was legislation that was passed in 1830 by and signed by President Andrew Jackson of Tennessee called the Indian Removal Act. Removal Act, which allowed anybody to remove Native American people from the lands that they had occupied for thousands of years and march them off to Oklahoma and put them into concentration camps, no different than Auschwitz. And if they died on the way, they died on the way because they weren't people. And here was Thoreau, living in Concord, Massachusetts, saying, "I won't pay my taxes to a government who does this, and I have an obligation not to." And he was in jail, and his neighbor from two streets over and seven houses down was a man you've probably heard of, a man whose picture is on my writing table and has been for 25 years, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And Emerson came to the jail and paid his bail. And Thoreau, rather than pay his taxes, went to, uh, live at Walden Pond. And at Walden, he wrote his essay on the necessity of civil disobedience, how important it is to stand up. You know, my mother— I'm going to visit her on Sunday in Florida, and she's 94. And you know, when my mother was born in 1916, women couldn't vote in America. Think of that, one generation removed from me. All the decisions that were made in all of the history of our country and the colonial history before were made by men— no, by white men. So that happened because 50% of the population began to say, it isn't going to be that way anymore, and we're just because it's the law, we're going to disobey it. And I think that's what has to happen. That's how civil rights acts get passed. It's how rights for people who are perhaps different than the rest but have certainly the same rights— and we need people who are willing to stand up and say, even if it is the law, it doesn't apply to me. Sometimes it costs people their lives, cost a lot of them their lives, just to get women to vote. And now we're faced with this whole thing about gay rights and so on, whether people people. It's like Victor Hugo said it so beautifully: there's nothing more powerful, he said, than an idea whose time has come. And when an idea's time has come, it can't be stopped. It just can't be stopped. And I, I think about that when I hear all of the people proselytizing about, you know, God doesn't like these kind of people and God favors these kind of people. And I know there's not much of that in this room, but there's a lot of it out there, isn't there? So independence of the good opinion of other people, the second of these qualities qualities. And, uh, you know, I'm getting ahead because I'm looking at the time and I want so much to cover here tonight. The second of these qualities is to, uh, be detached from outcome. That's another big one— detached from outcome. That is, self-actualizing people, said Maslow, do not do what they do because of what benefit will come to them. They do what they do because their heart tells them, this is who you are, and it doesn't make any difference whether you make money whether you get approval or don't get approval, whether it is something that fits in with society, it doesn't make any difference. And you don't do what you're going to do because of how you're going to look or whether or not you're going to be approved or not approved. You do what you do because this is who you are. I gave a talk last Saturday in Maui at the Maui Writers Conference, and I just said to them, writing is not something that I do. I don't write to sell books. I don't write to make money. I don't write to be on the bestseller list. I don't write for, uh, good reviews. I write because writing is what I am. And if I didn't write, I think I would die. I think I'd wither away if I couldn't express it. And it's just something that I— and it's the same here. I mean, only because that damn Liz— where is that Liz? Where did she go? No, seriously, uh, the whole month of October I spent studying studying in order to prepare to give a talk for 14 hours on all new material, some of which I'll share tonight, that inside of me says, you know, you're 70 years old. You, you know that you have to exercise your body. You know you have to walk every day and you have to swim every day and you do yoga every day and you climb up to the 12th floor and back 3 or 4 times to get your heart rate up. You know that you have to stay, keep yourself in You know what not to eat. You know what to do for your body. You can't just let your mind deteriorate. You can't let yourself— you know, people ask me about retiring. I just, I don't get the concept. Retire from what? To what? Retire from being? I'm not a human doing. I'm a human being. It's like, this is my beingness. Being up here talking and having people come. For some reason you come and I got the mic. And it isn't just that it's not an ego trip. It's not an ego trip at all. It's staying sharp. It's keeping your mind sharp. It's staying on top of who you are and not because of anything else. And you just do that. You get to that place where, you know, I have a radio show every Monday on HayHouseRadio.com and I take calls from people all over the world every Monday. And that's one of my favorite hours of the week. But almost every question that comes in is about people who don't listen to their inner callings. I read an interview by Arthur Miller with the New York Times. He was 91 years old, and they were interviewing him. Arthur Miller is one of the most famous playwrights America ever produced in the 20th century, certainly. You know, you all read Death of a Salesman, you know, and Willy Loman and so on. And they asked him this question at 91. They said, are you working on another play? And I've loved his response. I memorized it. He said, I don't know, but I probably am. Now, does that resonate with you? Do you, do you get what, what he was saying there? Listen to, uh, I was a Jungian analyst. That's what I was trained in. This is the— let's see if I can find— here's Carl Jung, one of the greatest minds ever. From the beginning, he said, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty. It had me. When Liz introduced me, she called me the father of motivation, and I'm already the father of enough. I promise you that I don't need to be the father of anything more. But they— I got that label thrown at me 20 years ago or so. And motivation is like— it's, it's like a motivated person is someone who gets a hold of an idea and they won't let anything interfere with them accomplishing what it is that they set out to I'm not a motivated person, and I don't really believe much in motivation because that's all ego. You know, I'm going to do it and nobody's going to stop me, and I have an idea of what I want to do, and it's me, me, me, me, me doing that. I prefer to be called the father of inspiration. If motivation is you getting a hold of an idea and taking it to where it wants to go without anybody interfering, inspiration is the opposite. It's when an idea gets a hold of you and it takes you where you were intended to go when you came into this world from the field of intention. And that's almost like radical humility is what you need for that. But this is what my friend Carlos Castaneda said. He said, in the universe there is an unmeasurable, indescribable force which those who live of the source call intention, and that absolutely everything that that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link. Sorcerers, that is, those who live of the source, are not only concerned with understanding and explaining that connecting link, but they are especially concerned with cleansing it of the numbing effects brought about by the concerns of living at ordinary levels of consciousness. In other words, we have a connection to this field of intention This field of intention is that which everything is intended from. It is the source of all. And every single one of us is connected to it, except that the connection gets rusty. And we're going to cleanse that tonight a little bit, in a little while. And when you get to this place where you understand that intention is not something that you do, that is an ego stance. Intention is something that you are a part of. Is a field of energy from which all things are intended, to which all things return. And you can't ever be disconnected to— from it, but you can believe that you are. And in the process of believing that you are, you move away from your source. And in the process of moving away from your source, you detach yourself from who you really are. And instead, you begin to try to do it for other people, and you start doing things because of what may come you instead of what intention offered you. Does that make sense? And you can do this, and you can cleanse yourself of this. And when you get to that place where you can cleanse yourself of the numbing effects brought about— they brought about because you've chosen to live at an ordinary level of consciousness, when in fact every single person in this room is a piece of God. All of you. The third quality is of self-actualization. Maslow said was that These are people who have no investment in power over others. They have no investment in trying to dominate or control or manipulate or influence or do anything for anyone else. They're detached from all of that. They are focused on who they are, and who they are and what they do don't have any conflict. They are one with it. They let other people be who they are. Very different than what you see on Fox News. Very different from what you see on MSNBC. MSNBC. Very different from so much of the attempt to influence and tell people what they should be or shouldn't be. I want to move on. The fourth is, uh, and this one I loved, and I used to think about this a lot as a young doctoral student. He said, they see— remember the story of Fritz Riedel and the guy at the party who just doesn't notice what people are wearing? He said, these are people who see the unfolding of God in everyone they encounter. That's what they see. They see themselves in others, the unfolding of God, because they believe that they are God, pieces of God as well. So these are the qualities. And you know, my life just changed. It's like you just never know, a quantum moment can come along. In the movie, I talk about these quantum moments at Asilomar there. It was 1966, and I was 26 years old, and I was a, uh, a school counselor at an all-girls school in in Michigan, Mercy High School. And then I was the director of the counseling there, and then the assistant principal and principal there for a while. Education is where I came from— elementary school, junior high school, high school, college, undergraduate, graduate. I taught at every level for years, 7 years at a university. And being in education and being an educator is, um, here I am, 26 years old, and I have all of the parents come in on a Monday night, and I'm I'm, as the counseling director, just got my master's degree, and I'm giving a talk and telling what the school year is going to be like and telling all the parents, and this is a private school, and so on. The next day, I spoke to about 1,500 people, all the parents come in. The next day, a girl named Nancy Armstrong walks into my office and hands me a book, and she said, my mom heard you talk last night and she was very interested in what you had to say, and she said this is a a gift. She's a member of the Book of the Month Club, and this is a bonus book that they give. And she didn't want it, but she thought you would really like it, and she wanted to give it to you. And that moment changed my entire life, the whole course of my life, and in fact influenced this talk, the first hour of this talk that I've given tonight. And the book was a collection of writings. I don't even remember the name of it, but at the back of the book there was a 57-page essay called The Whole Man— W-H-O-L-E— The Whole Man. And And I was already admitted to the doctoral program, and I was going to study behaviorism, Skinner research, how mice behave and things like that. And I read that essay by Abraham Maslow, and I went to my advisor, Dr. Mildred Peters, that evening, and I said, I want to study and major in self-actualization therapy and teaching people how they can become— reach their ultimate highest place in their life. And she said, but you've already been accepted under this program, but Mildred Peters was one of those people who could just get things done. She was a PhD. This was 1960. There weren't very many women PhDs in the mid-1960s at universities, full professors. She was the only one in the whole college there. And people listened to her, and she had brass, you know what, she was like tough. And she pulled all the strings to get me to reverse it and allowed me to write my dissertation. Interpretation and study a whole different approach. And it was because of one simple little quantum moment of a girl, a high school girl, just handing me this book changed everything in my life. And I began to think about what human beings can do and what we can become and how great, how much greatness we have within us. So I'm going to shift now to something else, and then when I, after this next section, I'm going to go into what I did in October, which is just mind-blowing. And I don't want you to get too tired. I know it's a Friday night, many of you have been working, so stay alert here because it's going to get really booga-booga. I'm sure most of you know because it's been all over the news that, you know, ABC News followed me around for a long time and did a report on me. And I'm sure many of you know that I have leukemia, and I've known about it for about a year now, but I don't say that anyplace else but just to use it as an example, because I don't have leukemia, my body does, and that's a very big distinction, okay? And my body is not going to have it much longer, even though everywhere and everything that people send me from the medical community say that it's incurable. It seems to be not that way for me. There are 8 markers for leukemia, and, um, my last, uh, set of tests, 2 of them are back to normal. So I've got 6 to go, but I brought someone here with me tonight to speak to you for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or so that could really change your life. So listen up big time. This is a very big moment. Some of you maybe remember when I— if you come to these over the years, remember when I brought Immaculée Ilibagiza here from Rwanda to tell her story, and I wrote the foreword to her book called Left to Tell, in which I told her about Viktor Evan Carmichael, and how he had survived to tell, and how she had survived in a bathroom with 7 other women for 91 days against all odds. Today her star shines big, and she talks all over the country, and very, very, very, very, very proud to have brought her to the attention of the world, and I'm doing it again tonight. The day that I found out that I had leukemia was a bizarre day for me. I didn't go in there because I was I didn't go looking for some kind of a diagnosis. I just happened to— they just, at this doctor's office that I had gone into because he was just doing sort of a physical kind of thing, they took blood and he called me in and told me that I had this disease. And I just thought that he'd made a mistake. I've been helping people with cancer for years and I just never thought that— I just don't do cancer, you know, I just don't. I mean, I'm in good shape, I don't eat meat, I exercise, I do all of the things that you're supposed to do, and I meditate, and I don't do— I just don't— that's not possible. So I had the results sent to several places, but it turns out that it was absolutely confirmed that I have CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which, if you're going to have leukemia, is the nicest thing to say about it. It's the nicest kind of leukemia you can have. It's not life-threatening, but because, uh, that's because my life can't be threatened. So, um, that day I, um, came back to my, my place where I lived on Maui, Kaanapali Beach, and I was just kind of— I was in shock to have this kind of thing because I didn't feel bad. I didn't, you know, it's like, you know, what's different? I've just— now you've got leukemia in your blood, you know, you've got cancer in your blood. Of what? I don't even know what it meant. And that day As, uh, God would have it, two women were, uh, on Maui to talk to me about an integrative approach to medicine. And they had been using, um, my works, particularly The Power of Intention, the one I just mentioned, and, uh, Inspiration, the Tao books, and so on. And they really wanted to see if I would be willing to cooperate with them in their integrative approach to medicine. The woman worked with, uh, Andy Weil. Many of you, I'm sure, know Andy Weil. He's right here in Phoenix or Scottsdale, someplace. He's nearby here. Tucson. That's all the same. Uh, it is. Everything is the same. It's all the same.

Don't get attached.

Don't get attached to yourself. I think it's the greatest lesson you have to learn. It's the lesson I've had to learn now at 70, which is how to love without attachment. More about that later. Everything that I've experienced in my life has become part of what I speak about, from living in an orphanage to my addictions in my life, to divorce, to all of it. So that day, these two ladies, they knew where I lived and they'd written me a letter and wanted to talk to me. And I said what I always say, maybe, but if it works out and, you know, whatever, basically hoping that it wouldn't because there's just so much of that in my life, so much of that. And I went out to walk that day at a time when I don't normally walk, and I I, uh, normally when I walk out, I turn right out of the door and, uh, go on a different walk. And I wanted to be alone. I just wanted to be alone. But instead, for that reason, for some reason, because there are just— there's just no accidents. I mean, the one thing you can count on is that there are no accidents in this universe. This is a universe that is organized by a divine intelligence that we're all a part of, and none of us can escape that. So, um, I turned left, and here were these two ladies sitting on my lawns stalking me. No, not really. And they started talking to me. One's name was Kim Evans and the other's name was Pam McDonald. And they started talking to me about this integrative approach to medicine and how they use my work with their patients. And they're both nurse practitioners. They have their own practice. They do— they write prescriptions. They're like doctors, you know, they write their own prescriptions. They have huge practice and so on. And I just finally, I just, I guess I I must have looked a little weary or teary or something, and I said, I broke down and I just said, "You know, an hour ago I found out that I have leukemia." And Pam said, "Well, now I know why we're here. We certainly aren't here to talk about an integrative approach to medicine. We're here to, I'm here to help you, and I can help you." And I listened, and she began to tell me about something that I had never heard of called the APO gene thing, and she was telling me about genetics. And the food that you eat, and the food that you eat is, you know, it's like we're in a huge crisis in this country. We're in a huge crisis. There are 3 major big crises. One is the food we eat, you know, with these GMOs and this chronic obesity crisis that we have going on. One out of every 3 children obese in our country. We have another huge crisis on pharmaceuticals. I know in 19— you want to hear an alarming statistic? In 1970, There were 2 billion prescription pills, individual pills, swallowed in America in 1970. 2 billion pills. One generation later, in 2007, there are 113 billion tablets consumed in one new generation. Think of what that is, from 2 billion to 113 billion. We're becoming a nation of addicts, people who are addicted to— and I know it's in my family. So for every congressman in Washington, there are 4 lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, 4 for every congressman. That's how big this is. The airwaves are just filled with nothing but prescriptions for prescription drugs, advertisements for prescription drugs. We're the only country in the world that allows that. No other country allows them to be telling the average public to go to your doctor and ask for this drug. When you think about it, it monopolizes— I don't have to tell you— it monopolizes the airwaves. So we've got a huge a crisis going on there. The average amount of sugar consumed in the United States in 1900 was 18 grams a day. Today it's almost 300. It's a crisis. And Pam said to me, I want to find out what your genetic blueprint is and then devise a diet for you to show you how you can transcend not only this leukemia but the heart disease that I had had and, and, and so on. And she didn't say any more, but she arranged to have blood taken. She flew at her own expense to me to deliver the results and to put me on a whole new approach. I'm not going to say any more, more about it because she's much more eloquent and knowledgeable about it. But I found out later that she had self-published a book that she had written before. She didn't even tell me this until 6 months later. And I took it to Louise Hay at Hay House and said, I'm going to write the foreword to this book. Because when I went on the program that was designed for me based upon upon genetically who I am, what I inherited from my parents. 23 pounds went off just like that, and my markers started to shift on the leukemia. I mean, you can just see the difference. I mean, if you can't, I can. I see it every day, and I'm probably healthier than I've been in the last 25 years. Feel great, enormous amount of energy. Thank you. And I wrote the foreword to her book and had it published myself to make sure. It's called The Perfect Gene Diet, and it is spectacular. In particular, it has made a huge impact on me. Now for the good stuff. This beginning of October, in preparation for that, I began to look at this whole concept of being able to manifest and attract into our lives the things that we really want. In other words, to fulfill our heart's desire. And I came across some just fascinating things. I brought the Bible with me, and there are two passages that I want to read from the Bible. Because what I've learned in what I do I did, uh, in that whole month of October in reading Three Magic Words. Have any of you read Three Magic Words? Yeah, it's a total life changer for me. And, uh, something called the I Am Discourses. The I Am Discourses. I Am Discourses. I'm going to make you familiar with it in a few moments. But basically, the question that I want to ask you, that philosophy— and I was a philosophy major for a while and taught philosophy, metaphysics at University is the question we all think about is, you know, who are we and where did we come from? Basic question: who am I? So if you ask yourself the question, who am I? Who is this I when I use the pronoun I? Who am I? You begin to realize after a while that there's not an easy answer to that. You don't get to say I am this body because we know that, um, how many bodies have you been in since you, since you were born? I, that is you, how many bodies have you been in? Let's see, you were in a body this big, right? Then you were in a toddler body, then you were in a 7-year-old body, then a 13-year-old body, and then a teenage body that did this kind of thing like my girls always do, you know? And you were in a 20-year-old and a 25-year-old. And the body that you're in is this constantly shifting energy system that is changing. Muktananda once said that, he was asked the question, what is real? Said that is real which never changes. So what part of you lives up to the definition of what is real? Certainly it's not your body, because the I that was in that, say, 2-year-old body— where is that body now? Where's the 2-year-old body that you were in? Is it gone? Is it evaporated? Has it disappeared? Is it— did it ever exist? Because you go into— meant the I that you are, the I that is I, enters a new body body, then another body, and another body all the time. And the I continues to stay consistent and unchanging, but the thing that it occupies just keeps changing. So you're not this body. So if you're not this body, who is this I that you are? And that was the thing I wanted to explore and, and really look at. As you begin to realize that this body that you're in, even the body that you came into this room 2 hours ago when you leave it an hour from now, when you leave this room, you will be in a different body than you were in when you were— you know, philosophically, metaphysically, I don't have to say that very well to this audience because you all know that. You've all studied this kind of thing. You wouldn't be at this kind of a conference if you didn't know that. That who you are is that which never changes. And so that coming into contact with that part of you that never changes is really the secret. It's such a profound knowing and teaching, and it's so simple. But if you get it and realize that all that you would like to attract into your life, all that you would like to manifest for yourself, is going to come to you when you stop identifying yourself with something that isn't real. And the something that isn't real— we know that consciousness is not in the body. If consciousness was in your body and you cut your leg off, you'd lose your consciousness, or certainly you'd lose a portion of it, wouldn't you? But it doesn't work that way at all. As I was examining this and looking at this, somebody sent me a book, and the book is, uh, well, here's the letter that they sent. I get very excited about this. So here's the letter. It was sent to the yoga studio on Maui, and I was gone, I was off the island for a couple of months, and when I came back, the yoga teacher handed me this little package. It was wrapped in gold and it had a gold-colored ribbon on it. Now I get books by the hundreds, by the thousands, from publishers, from authors, and most of them I just have to give away. I can't— certainly can't read them all. So I just every once in a while donate them to libraries or to prisons or whatever, just maybe give 500 books away at a time. But this little gift just sat there on my table where I eat in the evening. I looked at it for a week and then another week, and I thought, why don't— why don't I open open that and just get rid of it. It's just one more book that I've got that I've got to look at. And something wouldn't let me do it. So I finally, one day, I took the ribbon off and I opened it up, and I thought, oh, it's another one of these. It's like a channeled book, and everybody's got a channeled book. Everybody's doing the Course in Miracles, their own Course in Miracles. So this letter is in there from this lady. Her name is, uh, Carol Ann Jacobs. Her phone number is 828— never mind. And it It says, this is the note that it said, it said, this gift of gold is a pearl of the highest wisdom on the planet, handed down through the ethers from the Octave of Light. If taken up, used, and made as a living flame within oneself, it will lead them into their ascension at the close of this embodiment. With sincere love and gratitude for all the raising of the vibration you have done for mankind, for the Earth, and for all the beings of the elements. Lee Carroll and Jacobs. So that's, yeah, that's a pretty big claim. All right, and so I look at this little thing and I open it up, and it turns out that it's in 1932. It says here, the 33 discourses contained in this book were dictated over a visible light and sound ray in our home during 1932 by the Ascended Master Saint Germain and those other Ascended Masters directly concerned with this activity. The sound of his voice was physically audible to to everyone in the room. At times, his visible, tangible presence also stood within the room, and everyone saw them and heard it. So again, more stuff, all right? And I set it down, and I thought, all of the wisdom of the world, it's in this little tiny thing here. It's 300 and some pages, but the little pages. And I thought, all right, I'll, I'll just— for some reason, every once in a while there's something, and I just take it. And I started reading this, my whole life changed. I began manifesting things that I had never experienced before. I began to see things showing up that I put my attention on that had never happened before. And I didn't fully grasp it at this point. I started talking about it a little bit on my radio show, and it's called the I Am Discourses. Now I'm going to just read to you just a little bit of the very first one, page 2. We may have to stay till midnight. We have to keep you here till you get this, all right? So don't go falling asleep on The Discourse. This is the very first one in this group. Life in all of its activities, everywhere manifest, says Saint Germain, is God in action. And it is only through lack of the understanding of applied thought and feeling that mankind is constantly interrupting the pure flow of that perfect essence of life, which would, without interference, naturally express its perfection everywhere. The natural tendency of life is love, peace, beauty, harmony, and opulence. For life cares not who uses it, but is constantly surging to pour more of its perfection into manifestation, always with that lifting process which is ever inherent within itself. I am. Now get these two words. No two words, says U.S. Anderson, put together have more magnificence and potential for your greatness than these two words. I am. I AM is the activity of that life. How strange it is that students with sincere interest do not seem to get the true meaning of those two words. When you say and feel I AM, you release the spring of eternal everlasting life to flow on its way unmolested. In other words, you open wide the door to its natural flow. When you say I AM NOT, you shut the door in the face of this mighty energy. I AM I AM is the full activity of God. Having placed before you so often the truth of God in action, I wish you to understand its first expression in individualization. The first expression of every individual everywhere in the universe, either in spoken word, silent thought, or feeling, is I AM, recognizing its own conquering divinity. The student, all of us including me, endeavoring to understand and apply these mighty yet simple laws must stand guard more strictly over his thought and expression in word or otherwise. For every time you say, 'I am not,' or 'I cannot,' or 'I have not,' you are, whether knowingly or unknowingly, throttling that great presence within you. So it's why when I came out here, I don't say, 'I am sick.' That's not possible, because the minute that you say, 'I am sick,' you stop, you throttle, You hold back and you don't even want to add a word to I am. So I want to go to the Bible. I was reading the Bible upstairs in my room and I brought the one from my room down here. Okay, placed by the Gideons. Now I knew what I was going to read, so we go to the Torah, the first 5 books of the Old Testament, the Torah. And this is Exodus, and this is 3,500 years old, 1,000 years before Lao Tzu, and it is One of the oldest spiritual teachings on the planet surviving, the Torah, the Old Testament, Exodus. And the story is of Moses talking to a burning bush that never— doesn't have a bush. The bush just keeps— it just keeps burning and burning and it doesn't disintegrate. Moses is talking to God, supposedly, from the Torah. I think of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning Barrett Browning, married to Robert Browning in the 1860s. Earth's crammed with heaven, she said, and every burning bush afire with God. And those who truly know take off their shoes while the rest sit round and pick blackberries. That's from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Earth's crammed with heaven. So Moses supposedly is talking to God, and Moses says these two— I'm going to read two verses. He says— this is Exodus 3:13— then Moses says to God, 'Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they say to me, what is his name, what shall I say to them?' And God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.' And he said, 'Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.' I AM is God. And when you say those words now Now we lurch forward several thousand years and go to the New Testament. And here is Jesus speaking in John 8:58. And Jesus said to them, most assuredly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. Now, it may not mean much to you when you hear those words, but it may soon. Because I've read every word. There's 347 pages in here. And in each one of these discourses from these ascended masters, supposedly, whether you believe it's coming from another source— I happen to believe that everything is channeled, especially writing. I mean, I sit and write, and I don't have a typewriter, and I don't have a computer. I just let the words come. Now, where are they coming from? Even the words now that are coming to me to say to you right here, where are they coming? Do I own them? Are they mine? Are they coming from the mind of God, which all of us are a part of? So as you think about these two words, and I'm going to give you a meditation. And as you do this meditation— I actually read about this in another Hay House book, it's called The Moses Code by James Twyman, and he talks about this. And I've been doing this, um, this meditation for 2 or 3 months now. And what is said in here over and over again— there's one other page, I just want one other thing I want to read to you from this. I could go on, I mean, I did. Whoops. So don't worry. The student should constantly look within his human self and see what habits or creations are there that need to be plucked out and disposed of. For only by refusing to any longer allow habits of judging, condemning, and criticizing to exist can he be free. The true activity of the student is only to perfect his own world, and he cannot do it as long as he sees imperfection in the world of another of God's children. So that the ability to manifest best starts with your willingness to let go of any thoughts that you have that are of condemning, criticizing, judging, or finding fault with any other human being. You have to be free of that, because when you are recognizing what the three magic words— the book that, um, U.S. Anderson wrote, and it reminds me of Castaneda because there's no pictures of Anderson and he has no biography in his story And I had this book in my library years ago, but I didn't really grasp it. I knew what the 3 magic words were, and I want to say them to you because you don't get them until the 12th chapter of 3 Magic Words. And I brought it down with me to share it with you and say it to you exactly as he said it. This is the ineffable secret, the ultimate illumination. This is after 12 chapters, 12 meditations at the end of every chapter. I spent 5 or 6 hours a day in this, looking at thinking and thought and spirituality and consciousness, and basically was going to try to teach a seminar on how to be able to manifest using this concept, because the I Am discourses just shifted my life around. I began to say, this is the ineffable secret, the ultimate illumination, the key to peace and power. You are God if you will accept accept this towering truth and dare to stand atop this magnificent pinnacle, universal consciousness will be revealed to you from within. God is there. It is he who peers from behind your eyes, who is your own consciousness, who is your very self. You are not just a part of God, you are altogether God, and God is altogether you. Can you say that? I mean, can you really understand this? When you say I I am. See, when Moses spoke to God and God said, you tell them that I am sent you, it didn't say I will be, because the words I will be mean I am not yet. And God can only say— the only thing that God can say is I am. The minute that he adds anything to it, the minute that God adds anything to I am, it takes away from being God. I am tall. I am short. I am male. I am American. I am from Phoenix and not Tucson. I am from— okay? It's the "I am," the "I." So getting used to this. So before that, I had been studying something else. I'm just so excited about this because I have found miraculous, miraculous things happening in my life. So I have to share one other thing. It's from the White Brotherhood. Now, this is not white skin, okay? This is white light. Light, all right, the White Light Brotherhood. And this is what started me on the path. It was given to me by a dear friend. Listen to this. The higher self— you've heard lots and lots of talk about it. Our higher self, the highest place within you, the part of you that is not your body, the part of you that just keeps entering new bodies all the time, that was in little bodies, bigger bodies, teenage bodies, 20-year-old bodies, is going to be in a body, an older body, and ultimately is going to leave this body. Our higher self, the really hear this. Our higher self is perfect, omniscient, and almighty, a fragment of God himself, a pure, transparent, luminescent quintessence. Yes, but if this is so, how is it that this self allows us to make mistakes? It is this that is so difficult to understand. How can there be a being within us who sees and knows everything, is all-powerful, and yet who is totally unmoved, who never feels or expresses any pain, whatever we do? Why does he accept situations that are not in his best interest? And when we speak to him of our philosophy and our dreams and our hopes and our plans, why does he do nothing to put them into effect? We are not separated from him, and yet when we are suffering and trying to improve the situation, he remains coldly indifferent and leaves us to our plight. Is there no way of touching him? It is very important to get to know this higher self, for he is so far far above our own being that when he does decide to act, nothing is impossible for him. The only problem is in getting him to act, and we don't know how to make him want what we want. It's a problem that can reach tragic proportions in our lives. How can we spark the goodwill of this being who is so far above us and whom we represent so inadequately here on Earth? And then he says he only begins to notice us and give us his attention when we finally decide we want to get to know him or get to know her. If you can make a decision to want to get to know the I Am that is you and begin to understand what Anderson said at the conclusion of his book— you know, there's another one other book I'm going to talk about, Neville and his approach to manifesting, very shortly. I have read the book called The Power of Awareness 7 times, cover to cover, underlined it, written notes about it. I have a copy of it up here by Neville. I gave it to every one of my children for Christmas a couple of years ago and talk to them about it. It's one of those books where you read a paragraph and there's an aha in every sentence. You'll see because I'm going to talk about it. I've memorized it, all right? I know the book. And yet, after 7 readings— and I read it just 2 weeks ago, just before I did that seminar again, 5 chapters a day. Each of the chapters are 2 or 3 pages long. It's not a great big undertaking. It is so powerful in terms of being able to find out the God within you. The one other thing that the Creator has planted within every creature, a fragment of himself, a spark, a spirit of the same nature as himself. And thanks to this spirit, every creature can become a creator. And this means that instead of always waiting for their needs to be satisfied by some external source, human beings can work inwardly by means of their their will and their spirit to obtain the nourishing healing element they need. The Creator has placed a spark of himself in every one of us. My goal for myself at this time in my life is to take that speck of the higher self, the I Am That I Am that is in me that I came from, the God that I am, and make it a fragment, and take that fragment and make it a segment, and make that segment may be this large, so that the God that is within me, that if you heard what I just said, knows everything, is all-powerful. There's a piece of you inside of you beyond this thing of yours that's called the ego that is all-knowing and capable of attracting and manifesting anything in your life. And the name of it is I Am. Tell them, I Am sent it. You came from that. And when you get When you know that you are God, that God isn't some external thing that you pray to, which has been preached at us by religion since the beginning of time, and why so many people kill each other in the name of it over and over again. Because the truth is really a truth until you organize it, and then it becomes a lie, because it's the organization that we become obsessed with. Gandhi was asked about Christians, and he said, I love your Christ, he said, but I don't know about 'What's your Christians?' He says, 'It seems that your Christians don't know their Christ.' That was from Gandhi. So try to imagine for yourself a place within yourself that is God. Now, this little book that I was telling you about called The Power of Awareness, that is like something that I have been immersed in for a very long time. It looks like this, by Neville. So I open it up to read it for the 7th time just before I do this 2-day seminar. And guess what the name of the first chapter is? And I never knew it before. I Am. And it goes like this: The light is consciousness. This is the opening chapter. I Am. Consciousness is one manifesting in legions of forms or levels of consciousness. There is no one that is not all that is, for consciousness, though expressed in an infinite series of levels, is not divisional. You can't divide it. There is no real separation or gap in consciousness. I am cannot be divided. Now I'm going to read you the very last chapter. It's only a little over a page, very short, and then move into the manifesting thing. Last chapter of this book, after— and you can see there's notes all over this place. Let these words in. In all creation, in all eternity, in all the realms of your infinite being, the most wonderful fact is that which is stressed in the first chapter of this book. You God. You are the I Am That I Am. You are consciousness. You are the Creator. There is— this is the mystery. This is the great secret known by the seers and prophets and mystics throughout the ages. This is the truth that you can never know intellectually. Who is this you? That is, you, John Jones or Mary Smith, is absurd. It is the consciousness which knows that you are John Jones or Mary Smith. It is your greater self, your deeper self, your infinite Being. Call it what you will. The important thing is that it is within you. It is you. It is your world. It is this fact that underlies the immutable law of assumption. It is upon this fact that your very existence is built. It is this fact that is the foundation of every chapter of this book. No, you cannot know this intellectually. You cannot debate it. You cannot substantiate it. You can only feel it. You can only be aware of it. Becoming aware of it, one great emotion permeates your being. You live with a perpetual feeling of reverence. The knowing that your Creator is the very self of yourself and never would have made you had he not loved you must fill your heart with devotion and with adoration. One knowing glimpse of the world about you at any single instant of time is sufficient to fill you with profound awe and a feeling of worship. As Rumi said, sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment. Wilderment. Now, when you know that you are God, that a tiny little piece of you is placed in you, and you begin to use these words 'I am,' you stop with the 'I am not' and 'I can't have' and 'I must not' and begin to see yourself as this divine spark. And as you use this meditation— and this is the meditation that I use— you say whatever it is that you would like to attract into your life. A great job, a great relationship, a body that is in perfect health, whatever it might be. Write it down, put it in words, whatever you would like to manifest, whatever it might be. Write it out and keep it next to where you meditate. And then use this mantra for 20 minutes. And the mantra is, I am that. That was Nisargadatta Maharaj's biography. Nisargadatta Maharaj told me when when that book was out. He said, you don't have to read it. He said, carry it with you, and the energy from when the pages of this book— and he didn't write it, it was a book about, about his teachings, dialogues. He said, by just carrying it with you, the truth of it will come to you. And I thought he's just another crazy old man back in the 1980s. And then I began to understand what that meant, that there's energy in everything. And I say this about the Tao. Many of you know the story, and I was going to tell it tonight, but somehow I told something else tonight. When I was 65 and I left everything behind, gave away everything I had, all the clothes I had, all the books I had, my house, everything, I just gave it all away and lived the Tao Te Ching for one full year. 81 verses, 4.5 days on each verse, and wrote an essay on each one of them called "Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life." But then we put out the Tao itself, and I say to you, carry the Tao with you wherever you go. Put it in your purse, put it in your glove box. The Tao— Tao means the great way, T-A-O. T-E means the virtue of. Ching means book in ancient Chinese. The Book of Living the Virtue of the Great Way. Just carry it with you and open it up every now and then and just read something from it. And we have an affirmation next to it if you want to use this edition. There are many editions of it. And the Tao you know, some call it the wisest book ever written. And I could go into the changes that took place in my life by living the Tao, but they're nothing compared to what the I Am discourses have done for me. The I Am discourses have taught me, as did Three Magic Words and the Power of Awareness, taught me to once and for all not just intellectually know it, but to feel it, the divinity that I am. You know, when I first started on the I Am discourses, so many things began to happen. Somebody sent me this this necklace in the mail. I hadn't even talked yet about the I Am discourses. And it says on one side, I Am, and on the other side it says Divine. It just arrived in the mail the same day that I began to— the very same day that I began reading the I Am discourses and what they meant to me. And there's 33 of those discourses, and they're teachings of healing that— I mean, my whole body has changed, not only in addition to what Pam has done, but I am just a different person. I am so at peace and so humble and so aligned with the knowing that I can enlarge this spark to a larger portion of my life, till ultimately I can get to a place of being, just being love, just being it, which I saw with my teacher Ram Dass just last weekend. So that as you begin to use this meditation, now here's your mantra: I am the I Am That. Whatever you have written out on that paper, I Am That already. And then that's on the out-breath, I Am That, into yourself. And on the in-breath, I Am. I Am That is the spark of God within you. The I Am is God, the entire being of God coming back at you. I Am That. I Am. I Am That. I Am. Read the Moses Code and it's explained a little bit more clearly. And as you begin to say these words, just even saying the two words 'I am,' you are saying the name of the Creator, and it sparks within you a realization that that's you, that your highest self, your highest self, not this ego. Now, the ego is the part of us that comes to believe that who we are is something different than what we were when we were conceived and brought into this world. In the first 9 months inside of your mother's womb, room, there was nothing for you to do. You just allowed. I AM took over. What can your mother do? What can anyone do? There's a divine invisible intelligence that is allowing everything to just take place. The child is born. We hold this beautiful baby in our hands, which was divinely conceived and is whatever intelligence— Lao Tzu called it the Tao. Some call it God. Some call it spirit, divine mind, whatever it is, was just taking care of everything. As Lao Tzu said, you're doing nothing. You're just being done. Just allow it. Just allow. And then comes what we call the false self. And the false self is a whole new teaching. The Course in Miracles has this great line in it about your ego. Your ego is the part of you that believes that who you are is what you have and what you do and what other people think of you. Your ego is the part of you that believes that you're separate from everybody else, that you have to compete, that you're separate from what's missing in your life, and that you're separate from God, which is impossible. That's the ego. It's the false self. And this is what A Course in Miracles says about your ego: This fragment of your mind is such a tiny part of it that could you but appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the smallest sunbeam to the sun, or like the faintest ripple on the surface of the ocean. In its amazing arrogance, this tiny little sunbeam has decided that it is the the sun. This almost imperceptible ripple hails itself as the ocean. Think how alone and frightened is that little thought, this infinitesimally small illusion holding itself apart against the universe. Do not accept this little fenced-off aspect of yourself as yourself. The sun and the ocean itself are as nothing beside what you are, because you are God. And for some people who would hear this, they would say it's blasphemy, and that you know, that's like a very high ego thing to say, "I am God." Now, I'm not saying to you, go out and anybody who says anything to you, say, "Excuse me, but I'm God." You know, it's "I am God" in the sense of, "What else could I be? Where did I come from? I had to come from this invisible divine source." So Neville says that if you really want to understand how to manifest into your life, there are 7 things that I have put together from my reading of, of Neville and what I have been able to manifest. And everything that I have said to myself, that I have written down and tried this and said, I am that I am, I am that I am. Remember, when you say the words I am, you're giving the name of God. So this is really your highest self's name, God. So the first of these is called your imagination. Your imagination is the greatest gift that you have ever been given. Everything that ever was created into this world, from non-form into form, started in the imagination. You cannot create without having something in your imagination. Your imagination is that part of you that is that invisible place that no one else gets to enter. It's yours. You can put anything there that you want. And in your imagination, I'm asking you to put in your imagination what it is that you would like to have for yourself in your life, how you would like this life of yours to go, how you would like your relationships to be, how you would like your health to be, how you would like your prosperity to show up. Put it into your imagination. It's yours. William Blake had this wonderful line about imagination: to see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, to hold eternity in the palm of your hand and infinity in an hour. We are all led to believe a lie when we see with, not through, the eye, which was born in a night to perish in a night while the soul slept in beams of light. That's how powerful the imagination is, and nobody can take it away from you. And everything that you look around at in this physical world was once imagined. Everything has to start with a thought in your imagination. So to see this as a powerful gift— again, when Thoreau was at Walden Gandhi, as I told you earlier, he wrote in his essay on the necessity of disobedience the definition of success that I memorized when I was in high school. He said, if you advance confidently in the direction of your own dreams and endeavor to live the life which you have imagined— those are two key words— you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. That is, when you start living from the place of your dreams and your imagination, imagination, success isn't something that you will have to chase after. It will chase after you. It will show up in your life in a myriad of ways. So your imagination is this powerful tool of yours, and we don't use it very well. And we don't realize— and I had a whole bunch of stuff that I was going to do on, on thought and, and think, because most of us really believe that we think our thoughts and all we have to do is learn somehow to control these thoughts that we think. But the truth is, Anderson puts it this way. I have to read you this. It's just, it's too good. All right, it's one little section in Three Magic Words. Just a few words to this. As human beings, he says, we have been tricked into believing that we think. In other words, we believe we make thoughts. It is a peculiar thing that we believe this, since no one has ever been able to say whence a thought comes and from what it is made. But nevertheless, most treatises on the mind hold that man thinks up things and makes up thoughts. Isn't that pretty much what we all think about when we have all of these thoughts? Yet if you carefully analyze the process of thought, you will find that it is not you who thinks at all, but it is rather you who observes thoughts as they flit across your consciousness. Stated differently, it is as if the real you occupied a still and guarded position in the very recesses of your being from which you observe a purely mental that consists entirely of thoughts. These thoughts parade across your consciousness in a never-ending stream, following one upon the other unceasingly. Some you select and add to you, others you reject and send on their way. But the plain and irrevocable fact is that it is not you who sets the stream of thoughts in motion. If you doubt this, then try to stop it. And there's more, but I'll stop there. So here's how I look at this process of thought. You know how on CNBC there's this little ribbon, and on all the sports channels there's this little ribbon always going by, and it's like, you know, they got you. You have to watch the news and they got a picture over here, and then they got something that you— so you're watching and then you're trying to read. What does this say under here? Oh my God, I just missed what was said over there. What's this picture over here? You know, so think about that ribbon. Now this is really good. Think about the ribbon and think about this is just like all the thoughts that are thought are not your thoughts, they're thoughts of God. Every one of them. And there are just trillions of them and they just keep, they're going and going and this ribbon never stops. And you know this. Even when you meditate and you get to be the best meditator ever, you start thinking about how good a meditator you are. You know, it's like, you just can't stop the damn thoughts. And it's like, oh my God, did I turn off, I can't open my, did I turn the, did I leave the refrigerator? Oh my, did I turn my car? Oh my God. And it's like, "What am I thinking of that for?" Do you do this? I mean, am I the only one?

Of course not.

It's this continuous bombardment of thoughts. So here come thoughts, and they're always coming, and they're never going to stop. What you get to do, the I AM that you are, is you get to decide which ones you want and which ones you don't want. So as a thought goes by, and let's say you've just broken up with someone and you're depressed, or let's say that you've lost your job, or let's say you just found out that your partner cheated on you, or your kids just failed algebra. I don't know, anything. Your daughter lost her virginity or something, you know, something that's just, you know, as annoying to you or hurt for you. So here comes— here come they— here they come, and they're going by and they're going by, and it's like you say, oh, that pissed me off. Well, that— and you decide now which thoughts you're going to pick and which ones you're not going to pick, because out of these thoughts come your feelings, and it is these feelings that determine everything about your health. So you start getting good at remembering that you don't want to think about things that you don't want. So you let that one go, you let that one go, until a thought comes there that you want to grab a hold of. And you replace these individual thoughts that are so negative and painful and cause you to be hurt and cause your blood pressure to go up and cause all kinds of disease processes to take place in your body, cause fatigue, cause worry, cause anxiety, cause cancer, cause whatever. All of these, this endless thoughts, you start replacing the thoughts. Even just if you just do it 3 or 4 times a day, you just pick a different one. It's just, they're going to keep on going by. And if you pick one and it just really bothers you and hurts you and you're sad or you're depressed, you just give it back and you just wait for another one. And you put on top of the feeling or the thought in there that is upsetting to you, you put on top of that something that is pleasant, a beautiful thought, a the last time you made love that was so perfect, when you were out swimming in the ocean and that sea turtle, which I swim with almost every day, there's 4 or 5 sea turtles I swim with, they're so graceful and they're so magnificent, these huge things, and they're so enlightened because they're always at home. They take their home wherever they go. There they go. So you just put turtles there, or you put whatever, and you begin to pick and select. You get selective about the kind of thoughts that you have. And as you do that, your health starts to change and your prosperity starts to change as well. So I could do a lot on this, but your imagination is the key. The second of these 7 things is to learn to live from the end rather than about the end. To whatever it is that you place into your imagination, to be able to hold it there and place your attention on that rather than on what you see out here in the, in the rest of the world, in your physical world.

Act—

I call it acting as if. And this is where you say the words, I am. And, you know, I am wealthy, I am happy, I am well, I am kind, I am love, I am God. That is your I am-ness. You're just referring to the qualities. I call them in The Power of Intention the faces of intention. And as you place your attention on these, uh, and you start to live from the end rather than thinking about the end, only in your imagination. Because if you stay there, what you have in your imagination has to manifest, especially if— since you're God. And the I Am Discourse is one of the things I like best about it, is you don't ask for anything. You're not asking God to do something for you. You're not asking for any special favors. You're demanding it. You're insisting about— God doesn't have to ask if it's okay. I insist that this manifest. I intend that this will be a part of my life. This is something that I am absolutely creating. This isn't something that I hope. And you don't go in your prayer work to God and ask God to understand your conflicts. And the Course in Miracles, it says— well, I've got it written out, it's even better. I think the last thing I have to read. Listen to this: the memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict. A mind at war with himself remembers not eternal gentleness. The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict. Why is that so? God is oneness. You remember earlier, you cannot divide this thing called God. You can't divide it up. It's oneness. In the Shift book, that was the hardest thing that I had to write, this whole idea of understanding oneness, because we always think of two-ness. So if you pray to God to solve your conflicts, and God were to acknowledge your conflicts, God would no longer be God. Because God Oneness cannot represent two-ness or recognize or know anything about it. That's why it says a mind at war with itself remembers not eternal gentleness. Conflict is something that isn't in the mind of God. If Oneness says, okay, you got conflict— in order to have conflict, you have to have what, two, don't you? So it must be something that you're in conflict with. Oneness can't represent, can't recognize two-ness, because if it did, oneness would now become two-ness. It can't know anything about that. So praying to God to solve your conflicts, total waste of your energy, total waste of time. What you want to do is become that and say to yourself, I am God. I am God. This is, this is who I am. This is hard because there's people in here I know who are going, that's, that's just blasphemy. That's a meme. I mean, religion is just filled with endless kinds of memes that we have a tendency to think are really true, when in fact, if you really just look at this, it's not possible. It's not possible for you to be anything other than what you came from. And oneness is what you are. That's where you want to go. Now, as long as you're in a body and you have an ego, there's going to be dichotomy. Dichotomies. There's going to be these shifts, you know, but you're working at understanding the oneness. There's a place within you where oneness runs rampant, and that's where you want to go. So you think from the end. The third thing is what Neville calls— this is probably the greatest sentence in The Power of Assumption— assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. This is so good when you get it, that you have placed into your mind what it is you want to attract. You are thinking from again. This is who you are now in your imagination, and you have assumed the feeling of this wish fulfilled. This is what I have done with my leukemia. This is why I don't say to myself, I am sick. I just say, I am. That's enough. I am. And this body is not who I am. I am that which is well. That's how I think, and that's what I know. I feel that in my body. And it isn't until you feel it— you can't think a feeling. The feeling is something that comes to you as a result of you being it experientially in your mind. You feel it in every pore of your body. It feels good. And I've got to add the fourth one here. The fourth one I call the world of attention. So you have decided that you want to be well. You have decided that you want to be healthy. You have decided that you want to be prosperous, whatever it might be. You place your attention on that. You think from that end. Now someone comes along and says, didn't you see that article? Article in the, you know, on USA Today. Didn't you see? You know, people send me this stuff all the time. Here's something that just came off the internet. It's like, CLL is incurable. It says this right here. Every doctor in the country knows that's, you know, every oncologist will tell you that CLL is— I had an oncologist when I first went to when I found out I had this leukemia, and I said to him, there's a study that was done at the Menninger Clinic, which is this place specialized in cancer treatment, and they published it in in the New England Journal of Medicine about green tea, and that people who drink green tea on a regular basis and so on, and it's organic, blah, blah, blah, that they've been able to reduce their leukemia down to practically normal rates. And the oncologist sat there and he said, "Green tea is not a treatment for leukemia." And so we talked for a little bit longer, and then I said, "But, you know, this was the Menninger Clinic," you know, and it's like, I mean, these are the top doctors in the field. And they reported these amazing results just with green tea. And what do you think? Do you think I should maybe buy a truckload of green tea and just have green tea in my body all the time? Dr. Dyer, green tea is not a treatment for leukemia. And I left. I just left. I said, but if he doesn't— I've always believed you have to have a mind that's open to everything and attached nowhere. That's from Talopa. Just have a mind that's open. His mind His mind was totally shut off to any part— and it doesn't make any difference whether green tea or not green tea is going to reduce it. The idea that this is a closed-off person— and I'm now working with a spiritual oncologist in San Diego, Dr. Dan Vaccario, and my last treatment with him was to spend half a day walking through the Yogananda Gardens down in Carlsbad, California, and just breathe in the beauty of where Yogananda lived. Where he lived before he passed away down there in San Diego County, and just see the flowers and just be out there and just be at peace. To bring that into my consciousness, that's the kind of— and he took half a day just to be with me doing just that. Look at these flowers, look at— that's my treatment. The example I like to give is this kid that came up to me, kid, he was 39 years old. His name was Vincent and he had chronic stuttering. I mean, he had a really, really bad stuttering problem. Came to me and we were at a mall in Los Angeles and he could hardly get the words out like this and he'd been a chronic stutterer since he was 4 years old and he said to me finally he managed to get out he said he recognized me from public television and he said do you think you could help me only it didn't sound like that and I said Vincent I said can you imagine yourself not stuttering stuttering, speaking clearly. Can you imagine that in your mind? He said, no, I just kind of— I said, then I turned around, my two daughters were with me, and we— I just walked away from him. And he said, wait, you know, and I was just joking with him. And I came back and he said— I said, uh, if you can't imagine it, I said, I can't help you, because everything that you do starts in your imagination. So he said, um, I said, now I want you to try again. Just— it's your imagination. Can't you just place into your imagination the idea that you can speak without stammering. Can you think that? He closed his eyes. I said, just— so I said, finally he said, yes. I said, great. I said, how does it feel? He said, how does what feel? I said, how does it feel to imagine yourself speaking without stuttering? He had never worked this hard before. He said, it feels great. I said, that's the feeling that you have to assume now. The fourth point that I was talking about is attention. Now, there's two kinds of attention: subjective attention, objective attention. Objective attention is the attention that everybody will tell you that if you've been stuttering for 35 years, you can't heal yourself of it. It's the attention that you'll, you'll see when, when your, your mother and father will say, well, he's always been that way, there's nothing he can do about it, he's always been a nervous kid, whatever it might be. You're going to hear lots and lots and lots of attention coming your way about what it is that you want to manifest and how impossible it is and that you can't do that. But I said you want to use subjective attention, and subjective attention is you always go back to in your imagination where you are free of stammering. That's the hard part for most people because most people's minds have been trained to think about what they don't want or what they can't have or what always used to be or even what is or what other people want for you or what the experts say. That's how we use our minds, putting our attention on what we don't want. Why in the world would anyone think about what they don't want if they want to attract what they do want? Like, if I gave everyone in this room a million dollars and said, go out to the mall tomorrow and you can use this currency to attract what you want, you can use it to buy anything that you want. Say, great. You walk out to the mall, you take the money out there, you see a rug, Persian rug, worth $100,000 for the rug. And you look at it and you say, that is so hideous. I would never want anything like that in my house. Here's $100,000, send 2 of them home. You go to the next store, you see something else that you don't want— 2 lamps that match the rugs— and you say, send 4 of those to my house, $50,000 apiece. You've gone through $400 grand, and you've used the currency you have to buy what you do want to purchase what you don't want. And you do this all day until the million dollars is gone. Then you go home and you look at your house and your life, and you say, why is my house filled with all of this stuff that I don't want? And the answer is, you're crazy. You're just insane. You've got currency to purchase what you want, and you're spending it on what you don't want. The currency that you have to purchase what you want in your life are your thoughts. And to use them to purchase what you don't want, to think about all that is missing, or what other people tell you you can't have, or what the experts tell you, or what always has been, or even what is, is a complete— why would anybody come up with this sentence? I hear it all the time. With my luck, things aren't going to work out. Why would we ever think like that? Why would anybody ever come up with that? I don't even know how to process that kind of thinking. Like, my thought always is everything's going to work out with my luck. Things are going to happen. I've always been a reverse paranoid, not a paranoid. Paranoid is someone who thinks everybody's talking about them and saying bad things about them. I'm a reverse paranoid. I think everybody's talking about me. Why not? But they're saying nice things. So when people are looking, talking about me, I say, of course people are talking about me. They've got nice things to say. Using your mind to put your attention on anything that you don't want or that you can't have is a complete waste of your energy. So I've talked here about imagination, thinking from the end, assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled— that is, feeling it in your body, literally feeling it and experiencing it— and then using subjective attention every time the subject matter comes up or the thought comes up about what it is that you intend to manifest or create for yourself in your life. Every time it comes up, you go to what's in your imagination. That's where you go. You don't go to the facts that are out there. And the fifth thing is called the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is the part of you that runs most of your life. There's your conscious mind, 5% of your life. 95% of your life is your subconscious mind. Like when you drive, you don't think about, you know, how you're going to turn or how fast you're going to go. I mean, you can drive all the way across the desert, all the all the way through all the different— and never even think about any of it. You just do it because you've gone from conscious to subconscious. Your subconscious mind cannot make a distinction between what you think and what you experience in reality. It's all the same to it. So that if you put your thoughts— and so I'm going to skip ahead now to the sixth one, and that is, I call this the last 5 minutes. And this is the most important thing I'm going to say to you today. This is what you're going to take home tonight with you. The last 5 minutes of the day when you're in your bed and you're ready to enter your subconscious mind, the last 5 minutes, you're now going to enter your subconscious mind in the next 5 minutes. You're getting ready, you're ready, you're getting ready. What are you thinking about? If you are thinking about all the things that went wrong, all the things that you don't like, all the things that you are mad about, all the stuff, and using your mind, you are now going to marinate for the next 8 hours in subconscious mind. That's where it takes place. And you're sleeping, that's your subconscious mind. And if you enter into it, your subconscious mind says, so you want more of that same crap that you've been getting all day long? You want to be depressed some more? You want to be unhappy? You want to think about all the things that you don't like and you don't want? So that's what you want. And it will begin to align you with experiences that match up to what you are telling it it wants, because it can't make a distinction between between what you are thinking about and what's going on in your life. So tonight, and every night for the rest of your life, the last 5 minutes of your day, use it. Use those 5 minutes to enter into a place where you are seeing everything manifesting exactly the way you want. Self-actualizing people, said Maslow, never put their attention on what they don't want. It's always focused on what they intend to create and what they intend to manifest. And then the seventh of these things, I call it natural, just the word natural. So when people say, what if I do that and it doesn't work? And you hear this all the time, I hear it on my radio show all the time. When I was being interviewed for the ABC News thing, Dan Harris was the guy that was interviewing me on ABC, and he's about 5'7", weighs probably 150 pounds, 145 pounds. And he said, uh, so you're telling me— this was after 4 hours of interviewing, following me in London, following me in New York, coming out to Maui, filming me, spending several hundred thousand dollars. They had to. It went for 4 minutes on the Sunday after last Thanksgiving. And he made it as negative as he possibly could make it. And it was all about my leukemia and why would you listen to Wayne Dyer because if what he was saying was true, there's no way that he would have leukemia. It can't, and none of this can be true. And I would say to him, I don't remember ever saying that if you listen to me, that you're not going to die or something isn't going to happen to your body. It's much more about how you handle the things that show up in your life rather than telling yourself that it'll never happen. Nothing comes into this universe that doesn't go through the 4 stages of life: birth, growth, decay, and death. And I even told him, I said, life itself is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. Okay, so that's the way it works. You know, the question isn't whether they're going to be storms in your life. The question is whether you can learn to dance in the rain, whether you can learn to enjoy the storms of your life. You know, as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross put it, if you shield the mountain from the windstorms, you'll never see the beauty of the carvings. And the beauty of the carvings comes from many of the obstacles that show up in your life, including leukemia, which to me is a great gift to teach other people all the other things that I've gone through as well as a teacher. That's what I came in here for. So I said to Dan, he He said to me, "So if I listen to everything that you're saying, you're telling me that if I put into my imagination that I want to be a linebacker for the New York Giants, that it's going to come through?" And I said to him, "Dan, does that feel natural to you?" And he said, "No." He said, "I'm 5'7". Then I said, "Why in the world would you want to put into your imagination something that feels unnatural to you?" Now the question becomes, if you have been overweight all your life, or if you have been kicked around all your you've been poor all your life, are you able to say, it feels natural for me to feel prosperous? For me, it's always been very easy for me to say, I believe I'm entitled to all of the abundance and prosperity of the universe, and no amount of my achieving something is going to keep anybody else from doing that. I just know that to be true. Some people can't do it, and that's where you have to go back, realign yourself with God, and recognize, I am God.

I am.

I am. So that's the key. The message of change your thoughts, change your life began to unfurl for me a couple of years ago. I am now 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. 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 just keep happening over and over and over again. And I've learned, I think we call these subtle signals from the divine mind. And the more you pay attention to these, the more you begin to realize that your life is moving from ambition, which is focused on 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— 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 on this particular trip, there was a young man on this trip. My wife was there, and we had taken 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 I wanted— I always wanted to see that and be there, and people all just line up 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 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, 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 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 rewinding 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 I am right 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 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 Zibold, and John had cerebral palsy, so he had braces 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, uh, 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, Saint 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 Francesco, who for me is one of— I feel like I, I'm in his heart. See, um, 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, um, just the music and the sweetness of it, and, uh, 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 The Devil Came on Horseback. It's out now on Netflix, and 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 Saint 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 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 1,000 level. And that 1,000 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, 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 there. 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 room. We were— so can you get the picture? And there, there were hundreds of people going up, so there were people down below. And John said to me, he turned around and he said, uh, 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 What am I going to do, Dr. Woodhull? 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. Now, 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 stairs. 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 they're all piled up at the bottom, you know, we had to bury the whole group of them at once. 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, 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, that 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 energy, and there was actually an odor. It was like roses. It was a floral kind of thing, and it was just beautiful feeling and odor in the air, and I just— 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. Something just strange just happened.

I feel so energized." 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 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 St. 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? But that's not the purpose of my telling you this story. That was 7 years 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, 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 this book, the Tao Te Ching, which 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 put it into practice and to live it, which is what I decided to do. But my interpretation of that was I was in Assisi, I was writing a book about the prayer of Saint Francis, St. 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 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 I 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. So, 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 Huahu Jing, and the Huahu Jing is 81 verses also So some attribute it 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 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 te in Tao Te Ching— Tao, T-A-O, means the way, te 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, space, pace, that is 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 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 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. 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 faithful 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 Saint Francis was? Isn't that who Jesus was? Isn't that who 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 devotee said to 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, a 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 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. Nothing. You're doing nothing. You're just being done. In the first 9 months of your life, from 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, uh, 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 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. 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, God.

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 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. 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, 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. When, 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 just 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, 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. Left the dial. 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 many of the things. And my calling, I'm reemerging myself into the Tao Te Ching and the Huahu Jing, to reemerge 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, the day of 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 children 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, they will 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 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 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's 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, tell 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-minute 30 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 and 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, my 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 I'm 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 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, 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 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 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 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 too 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 emotional 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 Judy was sitting right there where that lady is sitting, 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 times the size of this audience. And something possessed me to talk to Judy, who I hadn't seen in 25 years. 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 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 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 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. 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 finished one full year of living the Tao. It's 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 extra one. 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." Or my father, Melvin Lyle Dyer, "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 those, each of those 81 verses, it was, how can I live this? How can I practice this? How can I put it in what Ariel and Liz set up here? Is that this book, I don't even feel that I wrote it. So I, 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, uh, It's just now the greatest joy that I find is in being able to live at that place. And that living at that place of just giving and just offering and taking nothing and just surrendering and offering it back 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 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 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 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 only 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. 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, 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 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 1,000 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 strongest force in the universe? 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 said that you can find your truth in nature. Got to read this to you. This is from the Tao. A spider 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 adventure. 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. The Three Tasters is a drawing that was made in ancient China of a barrel filled with vinegar, and there are three 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 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 it's got this sour look on his face. As Confucius tastes it, it is bitter because Confucius believed 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 vinegar. 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 Huahu 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? Chaim, life, life. 18, one infinite source, infinite source, once. 8, one. 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 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 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 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, 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'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 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 Agree? 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, 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 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, "Do you see how this works? It's just a 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 prediction 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 Borzenko, 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 So this book, the Tao Te Ching, to me is— 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 it's false and notice that you get weak. 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 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 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 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's 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. 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, 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 seperate 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.

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.

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