Wayne Dyer, There is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, Part 1

"The solution to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity within." -- Hazrat Inayat Khan

Can you make a flower grow? Probably your first response is, "Such a simple thing to do. Plant a seed in some dirt, provide sunlight and water and in time a flower will emerge. The proof is that there are millions upon millions of flowers sprouting all over the world at this moment!"

That is certainly true. However, I am inviting you to reread the question and consider who or what generates the life that makes a flower grow, because the who or what is the source of solutions to all our problems.

Who or what causes the flower seed to blossom, and the tiny embryo to become a human being? Who or what grows our finger-nails and beats our heart even as we sleep? Who or what is behind the movement of the winds, which we feel but never see? What is this force that keeps the planets in place and hurls our world through the galaxy at a breathtaking speed? These questions have been asked for as long as humans have had the ability to contemplate their existence.

Spirit is what I have chosen to call the formless, invisible energy which is the source and sustenance of life on this planet. This force, no matter the name we give it, can solve every problem that we encounter. There is a spiritual solution to every problem, we only need to learn how to access it. In this book I will explain ways that I have found to access this force. I will begin by explaining the three basic steps to finding your spiritual solutions to problems.

Wayne Dyer, Wisdom of the Ages, Part 3

The mind is like a pond. On the surface you see all the disturbances, yet the surface is only a fraction of the pond. It is in the depth below the surface, where there is stillness, that you will come to know the true essence of the pond, as well as your own mind. By going below the surface, you come to the spaces between your thoughts where you are able to enter the gap. The gap is total emptiness or silence, and it is indivisible. No matter how many times you cut silence in half, you still get silence. This is what is meant by now. Perhaps it is the essence of God, that which cannot be divided from the oneness.

These two pioneering scientists, who are still quoted today in university courses, were studying the nature of the universe. They struggled with the mysteries of energy, pressure, mathematics, space, time, and universal truths. Their message to all of us here is quite simple. If you want to understand the universe, or your own personal universe, if you want to know how it all works, then be quiet and face your fear of sitting in a room alone and going deep within the layers of your own mind.

It is the space between the notes that makes the music. Without that emptiness, that silence in between, there is no music, only a noise. You too are silent empty space at your center, surrounded by form. To break through that form and discover your very creative nature that is in the center, you must take the time to become silent each day, and enter that rapturous space between your thoughts.

Wayne Dyer, Wisdom of the Ages, Part 2

It has been estimated that the average person has sixty thousand separate thoughts each and every day. The problem with this is that we have the same sixty thousand thoughts today that we had yesterday, and we'll repeat them again tomorrow. Our minds are filled with the same chatter day in and day out. Learning to be quiet and meditate involves figuring out a way to enter the spaces between your thoughts; or the gap, as I call it. In this silent empty space between your thoughts, you can find a sense of total peace in a realm that is ordinarily unknowable. Here, any illusion of your separateness is shattered. However, if you have sixty thousand separate thoughts in a day, there is literally no time available to enter the space between your thoughts, because there is no space!

Most of us have minds that race full-speed day and night. Our thoughts are a hodgepodge of continuous dialogue about schedules, money worries, sexual fantasies, grocery lists, drapery problems, concern about the children, vacation plans, and on and on like a merry-go-round that never stops. Those sixty thousand thoughts are usually about ordinary daily activities and create a mental pattern that leaves no space for silence.

This pattern reinforces our cultural belief that all gaps in conversation (silence) need to be filled quickly. For many, silence represents an embarrassment and a social defect. Therefore we learn to jump in to fill these spaces, whether or not our filler has any substance. Silent periods in a car or at a dinner are perceived as awkward moments, and good conversationalists know how to get those spaces occupied with some kind of noise.

And so it is with ourselves as well; we have no training in silence, and we see it as unwieldy and confusing. Thus we keep the inner dialogue going just like the outer. Yet it is in that silent place, where our ancient teacher Pythagoras tells us to let our quiet mind listen and absorb, that confusion will disappear and enlightened guidance will come to us. But meditation also affects the quality of our nonsilent activities. The daily practice of meditation is the single thing in my life that gives me a greater sense of well-being, increased energy, higher productivity at a more conscious level, more satisfying relationships, and a closer connection to God.

Wayne Dyer, Wisdom of the Ages, Part 1

Learn to be silent.
Let your
quiet mind
listen and absorb.

PYTHAGORAS
(580.B.C.-500 B.C.)

A Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras was especially interested in the study of mathematics in relation to weights and measures and to musical theory.

All man's miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.

BLAISE PASCAL
(1623-1662)

Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and writer, whose treatises contributed to the fields of hydraulics and pure geometry.

This is the one time in this collection of great contributors that I have elected to highlight two writers on the same subject. I selected two men whose lives were separated by over two millennia, both of whom in their own times were considered the most knowledgeable in the rational fields of mathematics and science. Pythagoras, whose writings influenced the thought of Plato and Aristotle, was a major contributor to the development of both mathematics and Western rational philosophy. Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher who lived twenty-two centuries after Pythagoras, is considered one of the original scientific minds. He is responsible for inventing the syringe, the hydraulic press, and the first digital calculator. Pascal's Law of Pressure is still taught in science classes around the world today.

Keeping in mind the left-brained scientific leanings of these two scientists, reread their two quotes. Pascal: "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone. " Pythagoras: "Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb." They both speak to the importance of silence and the value of meditation in your life, whether you are an accountant or an avatar. They send us a valuable message about a way of being in life that is not popularly encouraged in our culture: that there is tremendous value in creating alone time in your life that is spent in silence. If you want to shed your miseries, learn to sit silently in a room alone and meditate.

Wayne Dyer, Real Magic, Part 3

And so too this unexpected turn that my own life has taken has occurred almost without my consent. I had no grand plan. I had no such goals or objectives for my life. What I did have was a willingness, an openness to seeing things another way. Now that I have been a witness to miracles in my own personal life, I feel compelled to share this new magical awareness. Perhaps you have been drawn to this book by the same natural flow of life that has motivated me to write about real magic.

Three Paths toward Enlightenment

As I look back at the entire tapestry of my life I can see from the perspective of the present moment that every aspect of my life was necessary and perfect. Each step led eventually to a higher place, even though these steps often felt like obstacles or painful experiences. Every successful, truly happy person that I have encountered has confirmed their knowing that there simply are no accidents. They see the universe as all-purposeful, including the so-called accidents. All agree that every unique happening in our lives leads us to a higher place. As Henry Miller said, "The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order."'

Begin right now to reconsider your entire life experience as a beautiful tapestry or journey toward greater awareness. A simple way to do this is to envision your life as a journey with three ascending paths.

1. Enlightenment through Suffering

On the first path of your journey, you learn through a process I call enlightenment through suffering. At this time of life, which has nothing to do with chronological age, you ask, "Why me?" when something occurs that is painful or difficult. If it involves, for instance, the unwanted breakup of a relationship, you spend your present moments suffering and wondering how and why such a disaster could have befallen you. After a while, as you recover, you are able to look back and say, "Now I know why I had to go through that breakup," and you see, with the benefit of hindsight and suffering, that it allowed you to move on to another life experience of great value. From the perspective of looking backward, you realize that you had to experience the pain in order to transcend it.

Real Magic, Part 2

I cannot explain how or why I have arrived at this place in my life. I am surprised I am talking about it! It simply feels as if experiencing and writing about real magic is my purpose or mission at this time in my life. Regardless of explanations, I find that I am filled with awe and respect for this unexpected part of my life path.

I am intrigued with Leo Tolstoy, in part because of what I see as parallels between his life and mine. He was a famous author during his lifetime and a man who had spent much of his life in hedonistic pursuits, one who had no spiritual bent in his early writings but witnessed in his own life a shift that seemed to be happening to, him without his consent. His writing began to reflect a spiritual quality, and he wrote of the journey of the soul and the world of real magic. Yet he was uncertain about why or how this transformation had taken place.

Recently a copy of a handwritten portion of Tolstoy's will, written by him twenty years before his death, was given to me by a woman who is one of the world's leading experts on Russian literature. In this will Tolstoy described how he felt about his life's work, which is precisely how I feel as I contemplate my own:

Furthermore, and in particular, I ask all people near and far not to praise me. (I know they will do so because they have done so in my lifetime in the most unseemly way.) But if they want to study my writings, let them look carefully at those passages in them in which I know the power of God spoke through me, and make use of them for their own lives. There have been times when I felt I was becoming the bearer of God's will. I have often been so impure, so full of personal passions, that the light of this truth has been obscured by my own darkness, but nevertheless this truth has sometimes passed through me, and these have been the happiest moments of my life. God grant that these truths should not have been defiled in passing through me, and that people might feed on them, despite the superficial and impure form which I have given them.

Real Magic, Part 1

According to the illustrious magician Harry Houdini, magic is achieved through illusion. A simple example is an illusion created by using smoke and mirrors. The illusion is called magic simply because it appears to be unexplainable. Late in his career, though, Houdini alluded to something that he experienced which he called "real magic." He apparently had acquired the ability to produce results that were in fact unexplainable. These magical results could not be accounted for even as the product of illusion.

I chose the title of this book because I became attracted to the paradox inherent in those two words, real magic. You, like most people, are probably convinced that if something is real it cannot be magic, and if it is magic it cannot be real. However, it is my belief that when we get caught in this paradox we are inhibited from experiencing our magical dimensions. I believe that we experience real magic when we transcend the paradox and that the transcendent view encompasses the experience of real magic as indeed very real, and also magical.

In the past several years my life has undergone a magnificent transformation. I find myself on a path leading to levels of awareness and results that I can only describe as miraculous. They are simply unexplainable in any other terms. I am convinced that there is another realm to experience when we are ready to go beyond this life to which we have become accustomed. This other realm defies our laws of science and logic. It is a place within each of us that is free of ordinary boundaries, rules and limitations. This is not some wonderland that is available only in imagination. It is magically real and available to each person when he or she is ready.

Wayne Dyer, Your Sacred Self, Part 5

Emily Dickinson wrote a stanza, "The Single Hound," describing this phenomenon. It is far more alluring than any prose I might use to make this point.

This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies,
And lads and girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.
This passive place a summer's nimble mansion,
Where bloom and bees
Fulfill'd their oriental circuit,
Then ceased, like these.

The physical you that we can see and touch is made up of the same stuff that everything else is made of. Yet you are different than the things outside of yourself.

To comprehend this, consider the four categories describing the manifested world: mineral, vegetable, animal and human. If we were to take a sample from each of these categories, pulverize them and put the powder into separate containers for lab analysis, the report would show no discernible differences. The mineral, vegetable, animal and human samples all comprise the same raw materials. Yet all of these samples differ from one another in an invisible, beyond-the-physical manner.

The differences, however, are not in the physical makeup of things. The differences are in what we will call awareness. Each category has a different level of awareness:

Mineral. The mineral world includes all of the things that you see around you. To the unfocused eye they just lie around and do nothing. You can look at a rock and it will not do a thing, even if you stare at it forever.

So we say that minerals, while made of the same physical matter as we are, have very little awareness. (I say "very little" because to a quantum scientist who studies things at the subatomic level and thinks in terms of billions of light-years, minerals are fascinating. When examined at the subatomic level they are alive, dancing and changing endlessly.)

Your Sacred Self- Part 4

A Unique Look At Your Life

The starting point to your sacred quest is understanding that the universe and our participation in it are not haphazard things.

Intelligence flows through everything in the universe, and has had many names. It causes the planets to orbit, the galaxies to stay in place, the seedlings to sprout, the flowers to open and you, yes you, to breathe and walk and think.

This invisible intelligence is in everything and it is everywhere. You cannot hold it or see it or smell it. But you know that it is there.

Outer energy, which controls matter and the physical world, is finite. This means that there is only so much oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. There is nowhere to go for more of these when we run out of them. All of the physical trace elements, identified by scientists and studied by schoolchildren everywhere on the planet, are finite.

Everything in our manifested world is made of these elements that exist in a finite amount. I like to think of all of our physical material as continually being recycled. Since we only have so much of this "stuff," it must constantly be put back into use when it changes from one "thing" to another "thing."

The drop of iron that is in your blood today is a part of the total iron supply. Obviously it was someplace else before you were conceived. Fifteen million years ago it might have been part of an iron ore deposit in Afghanistan. Today it is part of the outer energy that is you.

And so it is with all of the physical particles in the universe. A finite supply, continually being recycled. Material particles in one form, going back into the earth, and recycled as something else. Like one particle of magnesium from a sword showing up later in the femur of a panther.

Wayne Dyer, Your Sacred Self, Part 3

Defining Your Sacred Quest

The primary energy that you have been using all your life is the outer energy. This outer energy is life sustaining but does not provide the sense of fulfillment and bliss that we long for.

In his book Mystery of the Mind Swami Muktananda describes what the direct experience of divine energy is like:

One day this light will explode, and you will see it everywhere. You will see the entire universe existing within it. The divine light of Consciousness will begin to fill your eyes, and then wherever you look you will see it.

You will see its radiance in people, in trees, in rocks, and in buildings. You will see the same consciousness rising and falling in every wave of thought and feeling that passes through your mind; wherever your mind goes you will find your own inner Consciousness, the creator of the world.

You will see that the entire universe is contained within your own Self. You will know that everything--all the infinite modifications of the world--is nothing but your own play. You will realize that it is you who are being reflected everywhere and that it is your own reflection that passes before you all the time.

You have within yourself this power of transcendence over the ego-dominated life. You can turn around and face inward, directly contacting your spiritual nature. You can then live each of your days, regardless of what you may be doing, with the sense of bliss that comes from being on the path of your sacred quest.

Making that light explode for yourself involves understanding who you are and what it is that you are doing here in this thing called your body, on this place called earth, at this point in your life.

Your Sacred Self, Part 2

Divine Energy

There dwells within all human beings a divine energy. The power of this energy permeates our entire being and permits us to perform every function in the vast repertoire of human thoughts and behaviors. There are two aspects to this divine energy.

The outer aspect causes the heart to beat, the lungs to inflate and the senses to function--it essentially keeps our physical bodies alive. The inner aspect of this energy is dormant, but it can be awakened.

This inner universe is vaster than the outer universe. Inner joy makes all joy that is experienced in the world of the senses seem meaningless. When the divine light within you is experienced directly, it adds a radiance to life unlike anything that can be described with words or pictures.

When you discover your sacred self, you awaken this dormant inner energy and let it guide your life. The word most commonly used to describe this inner force is "spiritual."

When I talk about spirituality and being spiritual, I am describing an attitude toward God and the inner journey of enlightenment. I am speaking of expanding the godlike qualities of love, forgiveness, kindness and bliss within ourselves.

In my interpretation, spirituality is not dogma or rules. It is light and joy and focuses on the experience of love and inner bliss, radiating those qualities outward. I call the journey to discover your sacred self your "sacred quest."

Wayne Dyer- Your Sacred Self part1

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being."
--Immanuel Kant

I know in each moment I am free to decide

You have been facing the wrong way! The most important insight you can have is to realize that you have been facing the wrong way for the better part of your life.

Take a moment, right now, to experience what I mean. Picture yourself in any position that you like. Standing, sitting, lying down, whatever is easiest for you to imagine. Now look at that mental picture of yourself. What you see, in this exercise, is a you who is always looking away from yourself. Always looking outside of yourself. You are facing the wrong way!

Now imagine being able to shift around and face the opposite direction. If you could in some magical way do so, then you would be facing inward.

This is not some form of mental gymnastics in which you simply imagine yourself turning around and facing inward. I am suggesting a way of knowing your spiritual identity. I am suggesting you meet the challenge and take the path of your sacred quest.

We've all been taught to look outside ourselves for sustenance--to look beyond the self for power, love, prosperity, health, happiness and spiritual fulfillment. We've been conditioned to believe we get life's bounty from somewhere outside of ourselves. But it's possible to reverse our gaze from outward to inward. And when we do, we find an energy we've sensed but not previously identified.

Interview with Dr. Wayne Dyer

The Share Guide: I've been playing your tape set, The Wisdom of the Ages and reading the book that goes with it. It's a collection of your writings based upon the teachings of some of the greatest spiritual thinkers of the last 25 centuries. My first question is, How did you get the idea for this project?

Wayne Dyer: I originally was going to call this book 60 Days to Enlightenment. Abraham Maslov--who always impressed me and who was a great teacher of mine before he passed away in 1970--always talked about highly functioning, Self-actualizing people. I wrote a book dedicated to him back in the 1980's called The Sky is the Limit. I later became much more intrigued with this idea of enlightenment and higher consciousness and higher awareness, and I began to look at some of the themes that are in this concept of enlightenment. Themes like agelessness, and balance, and imagination, and independence, and power, knowing and leadership, patience and inspiration. . .these kinds of ideas…and I just kept a file on them. Then I thought, if somebody could read an essay based upon these enduring kinds of lines or quotes, it would really make a nice collection. I was going to call it 60 Days to Enlightenment--the idea being here are the 60 themes, here are what people who lived at this level of enlightenment are like, and here are some ideas for you, in a short essay, to go out and practice each and every day. So this is how I started writing about it. As I began the project, it sort of unfolded in a really sweet and wonderful way.

The Share Guide: Didn't you take 60 days yourself to write it? And Spend one day studying each particular master?

WAYNE: Right, I would get up early in the morning and start by having a look at what their lives were like, read their biographies, find information in encyclopedias and so on. Then in the afternoon I would immerse myself in all of their writings. Some of them were artists, some of them were freedom fighters, and some of them were poets and novelists, and I would immerse myself in their work and their message. Later in the evening, I would just look at a picture of them or an engraving of some kind, a rendering (some of them were very old), and then I would just get very quiet. I would listen, and allow them to speak to me, and I would say "What would you say to the people here today who are walking among us about these ideas that you've written about?" And the writing was done with a ball point pen and a legal pad. Everyone was telling me that I couldn't write a book in 60 days, especially with this kind of research that's involved. I remembered what Patanjali said about inspiration--how when you're inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all of your thoughts break their bonds…your mind transcends limitations and your consciousness expands in every direction. 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. And I was inspired. I was literally in the world of spirit. As they say: "When the student is ready, the teachers appear." Whenever I even got mildly stuck, the right person would telephone, or something would show up in the mail. It would always just be perfect.

The Share Guide: It's kind of like running a marathon?

Wayne Dyer: It is similar to that...very similar, and I've done that on several occasions. It's a process called surrendering. Ultimately you just realize that it's not your body that's going to get you through this thing. There's something in there called a spirit. It's like looking at a great painting and you say, "What painted that painting?" What in the physical world painted it, and when you look at it, you say, "Well the brush did, and the paint." But that's not the source of the painting. The source of the painting is in the spirit of the person who holds the brush and who dips it into the paint--so actually the source is something different.

The Share Guide: I know you've written quite a number of books, part of which I've read but this one is unique in the way it's put together. How did you feel on the 60th day when you were done?

Wayne Dyer: It felt like I wanted to keep it going; I wanted to do 61, 62, etc. It was like being back in school, back in college and reading and immersing yourself in the great poets and philosophers and thinkers, but not being graded. That's a nice feeling, because very often when you're in college, you're more concerned about what's going to appear on your transcripts, or what you're going to get on your paper. There was none of that. I was doing it for the right reasons, finally. I also was a teacher for many years, and my students often would say to me, "What somebody said or lived five hundred years ago, what's that got to do with me today?" I thought this book might answer that.

The Share Guide: I like the book a great deal. If I have a particular emotion that's bugging me, there's essays for all these different thoughts.

Wayne Dyer: That is the idea behind it...We've got a public television special based upon it.

The Share Guide: On book cover, it says "A modern master brings eternal truths into everyday life." and I'm thinking to myself, "What is Wayne's definition of a spiritual master?"

Wayne Dyer: Yes, that's an interesting word. Somebody else wrote that on the cover of the book. I don't consider myself a modern master by any means. I think I'm working and heading in that direction, but I'm certainly not at an arrival point. I talk about mastery in one of the essays in the book. There are four pathways to mastery. The first, the lowest pathway, is what is called the pathway of Discipline. This is the time in our lives when we train our body. We think of ourselves as having to go to practice; we have to really work hard at whatever it is we want to learn, just get some discipline.

The second pathway is the pathway of Wisdom, which is the application of the mind to the discipline of the body. When we send our kids off to school, most of the time we want them to get through these first two pathways. We tell them to get some discipline and use your head, and then you'll be educated. And that's true--that's basically what education is--it's a practice of getting some discipline and using your head. But it's not mastery.

The third pathway is called the pathway of Unconditional Love. You have to reach a stage or place in your life where what you are doing is something that is consistent with your sense of love for it. If you're not doing that, then you're stuck at the first or second pathway. An example is someone who's absolutely at the top of their game--when you watch Pavarotti singing, for instance, he has great discipline. Obviously he's been to practice. And he has great wisdom; he's obviously studied. But he's not the greatest tenor on the planet because he's been to practice and because he studies more than anybody else. He conveys a great sense of love for what he is doing every time he sings. You see the bliss, you see the joy. I think you have to get to that place. But that's still not mastery; that's approaching mastery.

The highest place is called Surrender. This is when you ultimately reach mastery--when you let go and let God. When you surrender the little mind to the Big Mind, and allow for the idea that it's not you who's doing this. You are not what you have, you are not what you do, you are not your reputation. You are the Divine, you are connected to God, and you have reconnected to your Source in such a way that it is really God working through you, or you working with God. I think that's ultimately what mastery is. I've been able to get there on occasion in my writing and also in my speaking, when I really just let go. I've also been there in marathons, in tennis matches and so on, when you absolutely just let go.

The Share Guide: That's your moment of satori?

Wayne Dyer: Yes, it's an awakening.

The Share Guide: Can you talk a little bit about putting spiritual thoughts into action in the world?

Wayne Dyer: The word "spiritual" gets tossed around a lot. It's almost like a buzz word now. I think you have to define it. Patanjali said 2300 years ago that spirit, reaching that higher place within, has certain qualities or characteristics. He said that ignorance is not being ill-informed, but ignorance is false identification--identification with the lower self, with the Ego, with the false Self and with the physical world. When you move into the world of spirituality, he said, what you are doing is you are becoming more informed in the sense that you are no longer identifying as a human being having a spiritual existence, but the other way around, as a spiritual being having a human experience. It's a new sense of identification. You begin to rewrite your agreement with your reality, with who you are and what you're here for. You see yourself as connected.

I think spirituality implies more of a sense of cheerfulness. One of the ways you're getting there is when you're more blissful on a regular basis. Most of the yogis, the gurus, the great spiritual teachers that I've read about or that I know, almost all of them are in a constant state of bliss. They can find bliss in almost anything. Also, effecting great spiritual change means not making your own quotas the source of your existence. Asking the questions, "What are your needs? How may I serve?" becomes much more important than "What's in it for me?"

In one of my books, Manifest Your Destiny, I talk about the Four Archetypes that Jung spoke about that we progress through in our life. It's very much like the four pathways to Mastery. He said the Archetype of the Athlete is first, which is identification with our bodies, and what we can do. Next is the Archetype of the Warrior, which is when you're in your adult life and you start saying what warriors say: "How much can I get? Who can I defeat? Who am I better than and how much stuff do I have? Then you move along to the Archetype of the Statesman or Stateswoman, which is the time when we stop asking what's in it for me, and begin to say what can I do for you? Service becomes much more important than serving self. I wrote about it in the Prayer of St. Francis. Ultimately, the Archetype of the Spirit is where you begin to see your Self, where you begin to realize that this is not your home. I think it's that recognition that this body is not who I am, this personality is not who I am, this Earth is not my home…the telling question of our existence is whether or not we have a relationship to the Infinite. If you see yourself as an infinite soul, an infinite being, sort of disguised as a person in the 21st century. I remember when they asked Mother Teresa what she did everyday she said, "Every day I see Jesus Christ in all of his distressing disguises." She would tend to the people, the Untouchables, in the streets of Calcutta. I think that's a beautiful way of phrasing it; that's sort of my take on spirituality.

The Share Guide: That really is beautiful. I noticed that you led off your book with a section on meditation, and that it was the only one that had two quotes. Can you talk a little about meditation?

Wayne Dyer: I can't imagine my life without it. I couldn't have imagined myself with it a while back! Most people think meditation is something to do to get rid of the stress of your life, something to do to make yourself less tired, to be more energizing and so on. I think Pascal's statement "All of man's trouble stems from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone" is very significant. Most people don't know how to meditate. They don't take the time, because they don't understand the value of it. In my opinion, it's the only way you can come to make conscious contact with God. God is that which is indivisible. You can't divide it. God is One. There's no place that God is not. So when you read about people like Gandhi and Maharaj, and Jesus, and people like Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna, Mohammed and so on, they're called non-dual beings, people who have "transcended." Like it says in the Bhagavad Gita, "they've gone beyond the duality of the physical plane," so that there's no up and down, right and wrong, beginning and end, rich and poor--there's none of that. There's just this ONE.

Meditation is a way of coming to know that Oneness. Meditation is done in silence, and in silence that's the only part of you that can't be divided. Everything else is duality. You've never seen a person with a front that doesn't have a back, with an outside that doesn't have an inside. There's this duality to the physical plane; it's always there. It's only dark because there's something called light. If it was always light there'd be no such thing as dark.

The Share Guide: So the unity is in the stillness?

Wayne Dyer: Right. Stillness is indivisible, and as Melville said, "God's one and only voice is silence." That's the power of meditation: it gives you an opportunity to make conscious contact with your Source and to regain the power of your Source. The power of your Source is the power to sustain and create life; it's the power to perform miracles. It's the power to live at a level of awareness that goes beyond just ordinary human consciousness or ordinary human awareness. Patanjali speaks a great deal on that, in his original Yoga Sutras. When you begin to go to that stillness and it becomes your regular way of being, you can start to heal people by being in their presence. You can start to read minds. You can even impact natural forces just with your consciousness--that's the power of meditation to me.

The Share Guide: I know a lot of people don't meditate regularly because their mind wanders and they get fidgety. I know you recommend Japa meditation. Is there any particular mantra or method that you recommend?

Wayne Dyer: My japa has a mantra. It's the repetition of the sound of the Names for the Divine.

The Share Guide: So any Name of the Divine, any mantra, will have the same effect?

Wayne Dyer: Yes. Usually it has the sound "AH" in it somewhere--whether it's Yahweh, or God, or Krishna, or Allah or Ra or Kali or Durga. I list 30 of them in Manifest Your Destiny. In the New Testament it says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So the repetition of God is a powerful mantra. You do it outwardly at first and then inwardly.

The Share Guide: There's one other subject in your book I wanted to address, and that's Patience--probably because it's the one I have the hardest time with. How do you deal with tension that comes up when you're in situations you can't avoid?

Wayne Dyer: Let me use an example to answer this. My oldest son, who's 25, was telling me that he takes a shower every morning, but when he comes out of the shower and he dries off, two minutes later he's sweating just as much as before he went into the shower. And he was saying to me, "I just don't understand that." And I said, "Your mind is not at rest when you're taking a shower. During the entire time that you're in the shower, you're in a rush and you're thinking 'I have to get through this, and I have to hurry up, and I have to towel off and get dressed and I got deadlines'…Then your body is reacting just as if it were still running or exercising, because the mind controls the body. It's not the other way around." So what I said to him is this: "What I recommend is that you meditate while you shower, or just get very, very quiet. Even if you only have one minute to shower, even if your deadline is such that it's very short, treat that one minute the same way. Get very, very peaceful."

And he told me the next day it was the very first time that he's come out of the shower, dried off and he wasn't sweating again. Now I do this in traffic, when I'm at a red light. Try this: When you're at a red light, recognize the fact that you have to sit there for a minute or two whether you like it or not. Now you have a choice in that two minutes--you can either sit there and fret and look at your watch and stomp and be all upset while you wait for the light to change, or you can sit there for the same two minutes and you can meditate. You can get very quiet, you can close your eyes and so on. The reality hasn't changed, nothing's changed, except you process the experience in a relaxed, and peaceful and blissful way rather than in a hurried and harried and raising up the blood pressure way.

You can do this at every red light you hit for the rest of your life. You can do this in every shower; you can do this with every deadline. You can choose to deal with the deadline from the perspective that the deadline is what's causing you to be stressed, or you can remind yourself that there's no such thing as stress--there are only people thinking stressful thoughts. You can process it anyway you want to--stressfully or unstressfully.

The Share Guide: I like that. What key books do you recommend for people interested in your work? If one were to read 2 or 3 to start with, besides this newest one, what would they be?

Wayne Dyer: It's sort of like asking me which one of my children do I like the best! I started with Erroneous Zones and just progressed up through. Someone wrote me today and said they thought my book Your Sacred Self is the spiritual book of the millennium. That might be a good starting place. I guess it would depend on where they were. If they were looking to perform miracles and manifest it and so on I would suggest Manifest Your Destiny. Or if they want to understand a basic philosophy that moves away from psychology and into spirituality, I would suggest You'll See It When You Believe It. If you'd like to learn how to manage your own emotions and not be victimized by other people, if that's a problem for you in your life, then I would suggest Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings and The Sky's the Limit. If you want to raise your kids in a way that embraces these principles I'd suggest What You Really Want For Your Children. I don't really know how to answer other than like that.

The Share Guide: That helps. Do you have upcoming projects that you want to mention?

Wayne Dyer: I'm working on a book tentatively called There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. I really believe that's true in any area of our lives, so I'd really like to help define these three words: Spiritual, Solution and Problem. That's what I'm doing now.

Wayne Dyer on Money

"If you are spending your life struggling at work that has no meaning to you, and justifying it by saying that you must do it because it gives you the money you need to pay bills, then you are opting for some personal dishonesty with yourself. You have made money more important than your sense of purpose, and as long as you keep the priority in that order, you will always be lacking in purpose and total self-honesty!"

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF THERE WERE NO SUCH THING AS MONEY?

Dr. Wayne Dyer teaches to just allow yourself to imagine doing anything that you would like to do. Forget about earning a living and simply ask yourself what you would do if it didn't make any difference in terms of monetary reward. If you are spending your life struggling at something that has no meaning for you, and justifying it by saying that you must do it because it gives you the money you need to pay your bills, then you are opting for some personal dishonesty with yourself. You have made the money more important then your own sense of purpose, and as long as you keep the priority in that order you will always be lacking in purpose and total self-honesty.

"There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love to do, there is only scarcity of resolve to make it happen."

Wayne Dyer`s Quotes 1

A mind at peace, a mind centered and not focused on harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the universe.


Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.



Anything you really want, you can attain, if you really go after it.



Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice.


Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.



Conflict cannot survive without your participation.



Deficiency motivation doesn't work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.


Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.


Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you.


Everything is perfect in the universe - even your desire to improve it.


Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.


Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.


Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.


How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.


I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.


I think and that is all that I am.


If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.


If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.


It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.



It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there's nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

Wayne Dyer`s Biography

WAYNE W. DYER, PH.D., is an internationally renowned author and speaker in the field of self-development. He's the author of over 30 books, has created many audio programs and videos, and has appeared on thousands of television and radio shows.

His books Manifest Your Destiny, Wisdom of the Ages, There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, and the New York Times bestsellers 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace, The Power of Intention, Inspiration, Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life, and now Excuses Begone have all been featured as National Public Television specials.

Dyer holds a Doctorate in Educational Counseling from Wayne State University and was an associate professor at St. John's University in New York.

Dr. Wayne Dyer is affectionately called the “father of motivation” by his fans. Despite his childhood spent in orphanages and foster homes, Dr. Dyer has overcome many obstacles to make his dreams come true. Today he spends much of his time showing others how to do the same.

When he's not traveling the globe delivering his uplifting message, Wayne is writing from his home in Maui.

Wayne Dyer`s Religious beliefs

"My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. I don't think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don't be Christian, be Christ-like. Don't be Buddhist, be Buddha-like."

"Religion is orthodoxy, rules and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally people are raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual."

Wayne Dyer`s Personal life

Dyer lives in Maui, Hawaii. He has been married three times, having seven of his eight children by his second wife, Marcelene.[1] Wayne and Marcelene Dyer's children are Shane, Stephanie, Skye, Sommer, Serena, Sands and Saje. His oldest daughter, from his previous marriage, is named Tracy. All of his children live in Florida.