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.