Wayne Dyer No Boundaries: What Happens if You Start Loving Instead of Being Offended?

these top 10 principles that I have put together here for this program the first of these principles came from a vedantic scholar on the in the 10th Century his name was tilopa and his first principle says as talopa put it have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing one of the central principles of my life is that no one knows enough to be a pessimist about anything and that each and every one of us when we close our mind to what is possible for us or what is possible for Humanity closes off the genius that resides and lives in each and every one of us having an open mind doesn't necessarily mean finding fault with all of the things that you've been taught by other it means opening yourself up to the potentiality and the possibility that anything and everything is possible so having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing really means finding within ourselves the ability to get rid of a trait that I find so common in the Contemporary world do you know that most people that I meet spend their lives looking for occasions to be offended they actually are out there hoping that they can find some reason to be offended and there's no shortage of reasons they're out there everywhere the way this person dressed the what the worst person said they turn on their TV they hear the news they're offended by this someone used language that they didn't like someone doesn't share the same Customs at you and all day long in fact if you keep track tomorrow you will find probably a hundred reasons that you can go around being offended but a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing is a mind that says I'm never looking for anything to be offended by and that whatever anybody else out there has to say my response to that is that's an interesting point of view I've never considered that before hey it's Evan Carmichael and I make these videos because of my first business I struggled to stay afloat I quitted my business partner and the thing that kept me going was studying the stories of famous entrepreneurs and seeing how they struggled and seeing what they had to overcome and listen into their wisdom motivation gave me the Courage the strength the belief to go one more day and see my business through and in all honesty I still need the inspiration wisdom motivation today for my business too so today let's live your best believe life and get some incredible motivation from the one and only Wayne Dyer enjoy I remember being interviewed for a morning television show and the woman that was interviewing me said how does it feel to be talking to audiences where people have all of these strange beliefs these weird things that they come to and it it it intrigues me because one of the uh one of the things that uh that Emerson said is in one of his very first essays he says the first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England where we are right now is that they are not new but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mold of these new times that was in 1842 he was speaking about that and this woman asked me the question she said doesn't it offend you that there's out there's people out there and they're talking about people using crystals to heal somebody and I remember my response my response was that if I've got hemorrhoids and somebody out there is convincing me that crystals are going to heal them I'm ordering Crystal chairs I'm uh why not I mean all you have to do is understand something called a placebo and what is a placebo it's nothing more than a convincing belief if I hand you this pill and say this pill is going to cure your arthritis and you take it and the pill is just a sugar pill but your arthritis disappears I'm into buying those placebos where can I get some of those placebos and it's true of everything and it's when you think about all the things that we enjoy and what our life is like um it took people who had a mind that wasn't closed to allow us to make the progress that we've made progress is impo is impossible if you always do things the way you've always done things but the other word in this what talopa said is be attached nowhere be attached Noah attachment really means I am deluding myself into a belief that if I can't have or if I can't do this or that thing then somehow I'm going to become immobilized so an open mind that is detached in one of uh in my most recent book in a spiritual solution to every problem I have a an observation and it's an observation from Anthony Demello a man I respect enormously a priest who um in the way to love puts it this way here's a great test for your relationships especially the relationships that you're in uh with those whom you love not your children but your spouses and your lovers and and so on try this test on for size one I am not really attached to you at all I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy and two and here's the toughest test for non-attachment I leave you free to be yourself to think your thoughts indulge your tastes follow your inclinations behave in ways that you decide are to your liking how's that for a challenge and so what most of us do in our relationships and why they are not as successful as we would like them to be is that we become attached and we tell ourselves that this person behaves in a way that I find offensive then I can't be happy I make my happiness my fulfillment dependent upon those people that I love being what I think that they should be and Detachment doesn't mean being a victim it just simply means I know that I can make my life fulfilled and happy by having a mind that is open to everything and attached nowhere the second principle is a very simple principle it says you can't give away what you don't have now it sounds ridiculous okay but it's more than what meets the ear as you hear this you can't give away what you don't have people who are not good at giving away love can't give away love because they don't have it to give away if I want to give you a dozen oranges I can't give you those dozen oranges unless I go out and pick up 12 oranges someplace otherwise all it is is just empty rhetoric and the same thing is true of virtually everything in your life you can't give away love for others if you don't have love in here to give away if what you have in here is contempt if what you have in here is anger if you have in here is fear then these are the things you're going to be giving away in your life and I've often thought and I really believe very strongly that there's a law sort of a law in the universe I call it the law of attraction and the law of attraction is one that works like this you get back from the universe from the world what it is that you put out there in the world and if you're putting out there into the world that I am not worthy of attracting Something Beautiful into my life that the universe will respond back to you with exactly that message and there are people who come to me and who came to me for years when I had my own counseling practice and so on and they would say to me um I just keep attracting the same kind of people the same kind of events the same kind of uh losers into my life why is that why do I keep doing it and I keep attracting uh an absence of uh of abundance I just can't seem to attract abundance into my life I'm always behind the eight ball I'm never getting ahead and I suggested them I said did it ever occur to you that that's the very kind of message you're sending out to the world and out to the universe that the ocean of abundance is there and you can go to that ocean of abundance and you can take a Mack truck and you can fill it up 20 times a day and take it out of there and guess what it doesn't impact at all the ocean of abundance it doesn't even go down a zillionth of an inch it's unlimited or you can go to the same ocean of abundance with a eyedropper and you can just take this much out once a month and say that's all that seems to be available for me and the interesting thing for me is that when people go to this ocean of abundance this uh unlimited World all that I have is thine it says in the Holy books all that I have is thine it's all there for you but if you believe inside that it's limited that you can only get so much that other people are going to get it before you do then you'll find yourself creating that very same thing and the even more interesting part about this you can't give away what you don't have principle is that if your message to the universe is gimme gimme gimme which is a lot of people's message to the universe I want this from you I want that from you please give me this I have to have that that's what their prayer is like that's what their messages you know and they say I want this from the universe give me give me give me the universe's response back to that kind of a mentality is exactly the same the universe will say right back to you over and over again give me hear me hear me and you'll find yourself never ever arriving but always being in a state of striving always feeling as if you're being neglected never feeling as if you have enough always feeling as if you're being shortchanged because you're constantly under the pressure to give to get back what the universe is demanding from you and the interesting thing about all of this the the irony of this is that if you shift that and you say to the universe to the world how may I serve how may I serve the universe's response back to you is how may I serve you how may I serve you and it's very intriguing when you take your energy and your attention off of what you are demanding from the world and instead saying what can I give to the world and it's really the the basis behind that very famous line of the President John Kennedy's inaugural address ask not what your country can ask what you can do for your country and the irony of that is and I've learned that in my own life that when I stop thinking about what was in it for Wayne Dyer and how much could I get and I began to shift and say how can I help you how can I give to you what can I do for you and people who write to me I send them something when when I encounter somebody that needs help of some kind I'm very often just giving that to them and then I find that it just keeps coming back into my life and once I shifted that energy off of what can I have into what can I give it seemed to me that the Universe responded back with the very same message what can I give to you and the most incredible and wonderful and beautiful abundance has flowed into my life in every way that I can possibly think of you can't give away what you don't have so take a look at an inventory of what you do have how much do you love yourself how much kindness do you have in you how much peace do you have in you how much joy do you have in you and if you're able to give that away as many times as you can in a given day watch and see how much more of that continues to show up and come back in your life okay the third principle is one of my very favors it's called there are no Justified resentments and this is a very difficult principle for many people to get but one that I believe very strongly in I was in a group one time of uh drug addicts and alcoholics and I was one of the people that was a sponsor and leading this group and the sign on the wall said there are no Justified resentments in this group and what I said to that group that that night was no matter what anybody says to you here no matter what kind of uh anger comes directed towards you no matter how much hate you may encounter showing up in your life there are no Justified resentments meaning that if you carry around resentment inside of you about anything or about anyone and I'm talking about the person that you lent money to and hasn't paid you back I'm talking about the person in your life that you feel was abusive in your life I'm talking about the person who walked out on you and left you for somebody else I'm talking about all of the things that you have justified in your heart and in your life that you have the right to be resentful about and I'm suggesting to you that those resentments will always end up harming you and creating in you a sense of Despair I've often said that you no one ever dies from a snake bite snake bite will never kill you you cannot be unbitten once you're bitten you're bitten but it's the Venom that continues to pour through your system after the bite that will end up destroying you so now you have to take a look at all of the resentments that you may have in your life and I'd like to suggest to you that I think there is a wonderful metaphor for this that I have created in my life for how to make this work and I think that Regis Philbin is the one who's responsible for it all right my buddy Regis there's a show called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire that has been popular all over the world I'm in South Africa it comes on all right I was in Australia and they've got their own Australian version um and in Greece they have the Greek edition of uh Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and basically this show has two levels that you have to get to now the first level is the one thousand dollar level and at the one thousand dollar level you basically have to answer a question like on your hand you have some digits those digits on your hand are called your feet your nose your ears your fingers uh and everybody whoever goes on the show has this horrible dread that they're going to go out on one of those questions right so basically in order to get to the thousand dollar level all you have to do is answer five pretty simple simple questions in order to uh to get to the thousand dollar level now on this program the thousand dollar level for you in this metaphor means that you will leave with something if you get this at least get this this is the thousand dollar level you must send blame out of your life for any conditions of your life blame has to go all right now blame means if you're sitting there with a disease you say without guilt it's mine I take responsibility for it this means that if you have been through any tough circumstances in your life this means if you have a minimal amount of Financial Security in your life this means if your children don't get along with you this means that if your neighbors are having taking up a petition to get you out of the neighborhood whatever it might be that's going on in your life you name it and everybody across the this great country and across this world has a series of these things that you're willing to say I am here because of the choices that I have made right now I'm willing to say that even though it's difficult and we know it's really not your fault we know really there's a lot of people out there who are really bad all right but but you're willing to say no blame that's the first level all right that's where you understand no Justified resentments and then and the uh Who Wants To Be A Millionaire show there is what is called the 32 000 level and the 32 000 level is not only an opportunity for you to walk away with a sizable amount of goodies which you can walk away from tonight in this program but it also is the door opener to multi-wealth but you got to get to this in order to have an opportunity to move into these Transcendent levels all right millionaire spiritual uh status all right you got to get through these next five questions and this thirty two thousand dollar question or level rather comes to this it came to me from a quotation that I used in the writing of a spiritual solution to every problem I read the a book that was written a couple of thousand years ago by patanjali the yoga sutras the aphorisms of patanjali and one of those sutures one of those aphorisms observations that This brilliant man made almost 2 000 years ago was this he said if you become steadfast in your abstentions of thoughts of harm directed towards others all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in your presence now this translates to blame pretty basic no more blame I'm just not going to assign responsibility to other people for where I am because now I have an opportunity to get rid of it if I think someone else caused it then I've got to wait for somebody else to change in order for me to get rid of it and you might wait forever for that but if I take responsibility for it I can do something including move on which might be the most important thing to do but at the higher level when there are no Justified resentments what you are doing is what Saint Francis did Francesco what you are doing is you are at a place where you are sending love in response to hate you are literally saying no matter what comes my way I am going to be steadfast in my abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others I'm going to work hard at no matter what comes my way having it come out of me what I want to come out of me and that is love and that is a higher energy and if you can get to that level patanjali said all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in your presence I have a little girl a precious little girl I have six precious girls and two precious Sons but I have a a little girl who is almost 12 and she loves animals like no one I've ever met in my life I mean her whole life revolves around animals and when we walk in the woods butterflies avoid me fly away from people around and they come and they land right on her arm and it happens all the time all living Creed she couldn't have a thought of harm directed towards any living creature and patanjali said to us all living creatures will cease to feel fear or enmity or anger in the presence of those who can send love in response to the hate that's what I mean when I say there are no Justified resentments what I'd like to do I'd like to share a little story here with you it's a very tender story it was sent to me by someone who sends me beautiful things in the mail and I call it the teddy story and I'd like to read this to you if I can do it without tearing up and this story illustrates this as well as anything I've ever seen there's a story many years ago of an elementary school teacher her name was Mrs Thompson as she stood in front of her fifth grade class on the very first day of school she told the children a lie like most teachers she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same but that was impossible because there in the front row slumped in his seat was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard Mrs Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he didn't play well with the other children that his clothes were messy and that he constantly needed a bath Teddy could be unpleasant it got to the point where Mrs Thompson would actually take Delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen and making bold x's and then putting a big F at the top of his papers at the school where Mrs Thompson taught she was required to review each child's past records and she put teddies off until last however when she reviewed his file she was in for a surprise Teddy's first grade teacher wrote Teddy is a bright child with a ready laugh he does his work neatly and he has good manners he's a joy to be around his second grade teacher wrote Teddy is an excellent student well liked by his classmates but he's troubled because his mother has a terminal illness and life at home must be a struggle his third grade teacher wrote his mother's death has been hard on him he tries to do his best but his father doesn't show much interest in his home life will soon affect him if steps aren't taken Teddy's fourth grade teacher wrote Teddy's withdrawn and doesn't show up much interest in school he doesn't have many friends and sometimes he even sleeps in class by now Mrs Thompson realized the problem and she was ashamed of herself she felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas presents wrapped in beautiful ribbons and and bright paper except for teddies his present was clumsily wrapped in his heavy brown paper that he got from the grocery bag Mrs Thompson took pains to open it in the middle of the other presence some of the children started to laugh when she found a rhinestone bracelet with some of the stones missing and a bottle that was one quarter full of perfume but she stifled her children's laughter when she exclaimed how pretty the bracelet was putting it on and dabbing some of the perfume on her wrist Teddy Stoddard stayed after school that day just long enough to say Mrs Thompson today you smell just like my mom used to after the children left she cried for at least an hour on the very day she quit teaching Reading Writing and arithmetic and instead she began to teach children Mrs Thompson paid particular attention to Teddy as she worked with him and his mind seemed to come alive the more she encouraged him the faster he responded by the end of the year Teddy had become one of the smartest children in the class and despite her lie became one of her teachers pets a year later she found a note under the door from Teddy telling her that she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life six years went by before she got another note from Teddy he then wrote that he had finished High School third in his class and she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life four years after that she got another letter saying that while things had been tough at times he stayed in school and stuck with it and would soon graduate from college with the highest of honors he assured Mrs Thompson that she was still the very best and favored teacher he ever had in his whole life then four more years passed and yet another letter came this time he explained that after he got his bachelor's degree he decided to go a little further the letter explained that she was still the best and favorite teacher he ever had but now his name was a little longer the letter was signed Theodore F Stoddard MD but the story doesn't end there you see there was yet another letter that spring Teddy said he'd met this girl and was going to be married he explained that his father had died a couple of years ago and he was wondering if Mrs Thompson might agree to sit in the place at the wedding that was usually reserved for the mother of the groom of course Mrs Thompson did and guess what she wore that bracelet the one with the several rhinestones missing and she made sure she was wearing the perfume that Teddy remembered his mother wearing on their last Christmas together they hugged each other and Dr Stoddard whispered in Mrs Thompson's ear thank you so much for making me feel important and showing me that I could make a difference Mrs Thompson came with tears in her eyes and whispered back Teddy you have it all wrong you were the one who taught me that I could make a difference I didn't know how to teach until I met you isn't that a beautiful story yeah [Applause] that symbolizes there are no Justified resentments work at reaching that 32 000 level the place where the only thing you have to send is love because that's what's inside and that's the message of our greatest spiritual teachers that's all they ever had to give away the next principle I call don't die with your music Still In You and who better to quote than Thoreau right here in Concord when he talked about some of us hear a different drama and we must March to the music that we hear but all of you everybody watching everybody here in this beautiful Parish all of you have some music playing and all of you have a heroic mission there's no accidents in this universe we all show up here with a purpose there's an intelligence that is a part of everything and everyone and all of us are connected to it and and too many of us are afraid to listen to that music and March to it you out there I know you have a book you wanted to write I know there's a composition you wanted to compose I know there's a song you want to sing someplace maybe you want to raise horses out in Montana or maybe you want to open up an ice cream shop on Cape Cod who knows what it may be maybe you just want to travel and see the world maybe you want to go into a relationship with someone but you've been afraid to but your heart says it's the right thing to do all of us feel something and in Leo tolstoy's famous novel The Death of Ivan Ilitch he asked this question that would be terrifying to me he says as he has his accountant from Moscow lying on his deathbed contemplating the horror of this question what if my whole life has been wrong I've known what my music is playing right now because I stand here in front of you with these cameras and in this place and as I sit down and write my books and tell the world what I know are my truths I feel always completely on purpose and fulfilled and no time will I ever come to the end of my life and say what if my whole life has been wrong whoever you are whatever that music is however distant it may sound however strange however weird Others May interpret it to be don't get to the end of your life and know that you're going to leave and not have it played yet don't die with your music Still In You it's the message of the greatest teachers who've ever walked Among Us it's the message I give to you today as one of the principles for success and peace in your life the next principle I call embracing silence and embracing silence is not that I say this to you because it's so important to be quiet what I have learned I have a dear friend and many of you know we've put out tapes together we've appeared on stages all over the world together he's like a brother to me his name is Dr Deepak Chopra a medical doctor and a dear and close friend and whenever anything is going on in my family if I'm having a problem with one of my children or with my in my own life and if I call him up and I'll say Deepak or his wife Rita I'll say Deepak what do you think I should do he always has the same answer meditate [Music] I'll say yes Deepak I understand meditate but I said what do you think he said Wayne go deep inside and meditate always meditate I'll say will you put Rita on when I meditate yes they are and you know I've learned a lot in meditation but what I know most about getting quiet and getting peaceful is this that there's only one power in the universe and it doesn't matter what you call it you can call it Soul Spirit Consciousness God you can call it Louise you can call it anything that you want but as Alan Watts said you can't get wet from the word water it's not what we call something that gives its substance and this one power this one force that flows through everything and allows everything to be is indivisible you can't cut it in half you can't divide it it's one it's knowing the one and everything in your life is almost always given a division male female young oh tall short black white good bad up down these are all dichotomies these are all these splits that we all have in our lives the whole physical world that we live in and are immersed in it's always immersed in this Division I used to teach course at St John's University in New York and I used to tell my students when I was trying to teach this principle anybody who can come to class and bring with them a magnet that only has a North Pole I'll give you an A in the course you don't ever have to attend another class and no matter how thin they would slice that magnet there was always the South Pole because the physical world is made up of dichotomies but we have to learn to fuse the dichotomies and infusing the dichotomy dichotomies and blending the want that's what silence does for us that's why embracing silence is so powerful because no matter how many times you cut silence in half it's like zero you still only get silence and then they say it's the it's The Space Between the Bars that holds the Tiger and it's the silence between the notes that makes the music these words that are coming out of my mouth right now come out of the silence and finding that silence and embracing it means that you go to the place within you that you cannot divide just like you can't divide the source the one the spirit you can't divide that either it's only one so when you go into your silence and you begin to practice meditation and you begin to make this a part of your life and embrace silence what you discover is this is where you'll come to know your Source you'll make conscious contact with yourself I can't tell you how many people that have come to me who have suffered from serious illnesses who've been giving given diagnosis that it's terminal and that you can't do it who have gone out to the wilderness and have decided that I am going to commune with nature and the transcendentalists Perot and Emerson they believed that nature was our source and that we were all products of Nature and if you can get back to your Source if you can get back to that feeling of being with spirit that that's where healing can take place and I've had wonderful stories of people who've told me that it was when I began to embrace that silence but I began to feel more connected to my source Embrace silence because it's a way to come to know God to know your source both are indivisible and the only experience you can have in your daily life that even comes close to a spiritual awakening is silence the next principle I call giving up your personal history [Music] and I learned it from a man named Carlos Castaneda who once said that one day he said I finally realized that I no longer needed a personal history and just like drinking he said I gave it up and that and only that has made all the difference in the world you know the nice thing about giving up your personal history is that if you don't have a story you don't have to live up to it all of us have these bags a manure that we carry around with us called our past and the people who have done things to us and the events and the circumstances all of this stuff that we use and we bond to and we Bond ourselves to these wounds of our past and we identify ourselves on the basis of these wounds and every once in a while we set it down and we reach in there and we smear it all over ourselves and then we wonder why does my life smell so bad I don't understand this when in fact the now this moment merging yourself into the now means that you may have been in a relationship I had a woman from Holland who came over to see me whose husband had left her after 25 years she had four children and she just had been on the verge of suicide and she was losing weight and she was depressed and she was taking all kinds of drugs for it and she was getting sicker and sicker because she just couldn't get over it and she came to a book signing that I was doing at a bookstore down in Florida and she said you've got to say something to me you've got to say something to me that will help me to get over this and I told her this line I said give up your personal history merge yourself here now into this moment and those 25 years are something if you want to understand how to do it think of your past as oh this hat and this is your past now you can't just set this thing down over here and walk away from it and give up your personal history because you'll always have it there to look back at what you do is you pick up your past and you embrace it you understand it you accept it as I had to go through these things that I had to go through in order for me to get to this place today and the evidence for that is that I did you don't need any more evidence you did and then you toss it you toss it you embrace it and you toss it and you merge into the now by giving up your attachment and some of you have heard me use the metaphor of the wake Alan Watts talked about the wake is not what drives the boat the wake is just a trail that is Left Behind that's all it is and so is the wake of your life and the Wake doesn't make the boat go and neither does the wake of your life the reason why your life is going in the direction that it is the wake is a trail that is left behind and it's an illusion to believe that it is the cause of your suffering or your struggles or your difficulty give it up Let It Go embrace it understand it get help doing that if you must and then move into the now the next principle I call it's from a line of Albert Einstein he said you can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it in order to work at solving these things called problems in your life you have to change your mind it is your mind where they live it is your mind that created them they there is where you experience them they're all Illusions you must change your mind literally rewrite your agreement with reality one of the things I had said earlier is that one of the most difficult things to do in the world is to admit that you were wrong admitting that you were wrong is nothing more than saying I have been making choices with my mind that have created things in my life that are not working and I no longer intend to continue making those choices I was wrong you don't have to make a declaration of it you don't have to go out and feel guilty about it you just simply say it didn't work the relationship that I was in before I behaved in these ways I didn't realize that it wasn't working for me now I do and this is where I choose to be now The Secret of a successful relationship is to me understanding that you put your attention and your energy in a person on what you love rather than what you don't love Robert Frost said it so beautifully we love the things we love for what they are for what they are not for what they ought to be not for what they used to be but for what they are so when you look into the eyes of a person you're in a relationship with whether it's your children you catch them doing things right as much as you possibly can that's often Tim takes a lot of hunting but you'll find it and when you think that my relationship isn't working remember it's in my mind what am I thinking about that person and if I could just change my mind and put my thoughts on what I love about this person and keep them there that makes the relationship flourish and there are people who go through their entire relationship history with no anger no hatred no bitterness and Only Love the next principle is I call it treating yourself as if you already were what you would like to become in other words you get out in front of your life and you see yourself as having already what you know you'd like to have and deserve to have my children know how to do this perfectly I have a daughter who wanted a prom dress and the prom dress was way outside the budget that I thought a prom dress should be uh well I thought a prom dress shouldn't cost over twenty dollars so I do have a problem right but I opted to somewhere around 250 to I don't know how much whatever to me it was still more than I paid for my first house okay uh but anyway she called and said Dad this is the only prom dress I could this is the I've got to wear this prom dress if I don't wear this prom dress it's just on and on and on with this uh wonderful you know I've got a I saw a wonderful book about how to raise teenage daughters the title of it is get out of my life but first drive me and Cheryl to the mall all right that's a that's the actual title it's a good book and so I told Serena I said it's just beyond the budget I've got a certain amount of money that I'm willing to put for it and she said but I've already seen myself wearing it I've already tried it on I have a picture of myself in the dress in my living room and I've already showed it to the guy who's taking me to the prom I mean it was this whole thing about and she already saw herself in it I said well if you see yourself in it then you're going to have to also see yourself as earning the difference between what I'm wanting to pay and she Drew up a contract she went on to the computer and on the background of the computer you know where they have these little background things they put on there was 500 pictures of the dress all right and she signed a contract and said I'll babysit I'll do this I'll do that and I will pay the difference and she did and she wore the dress because she understood that you treat yourself as if you already are what you'd like to become there's a genius in you you have to treat yourself as if you already were that genius there's something you're completely capable of see yourself as already there then you'll act upon those thoughts because the ancestor to every action said Emerson is a thought the next principle is called treasuring your divinity treasuring your Divinity there's a wonderful observation that I saw from from Emerson in self-reliance it's about trusting your Divinity knowing that you are connected to your Source knowing that you are a Divine creation and that there are no accidents he said a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within more than the luster of the firmament of bards and Sages yet he dismisses without notice his own thought because it's his own in every work of Genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a certain alienated Majesty we often reject our thoughts and we see the things that we think of as Grand and as genius and we reject them because they're our own treasuring our Divinity instead of being terrified of it knowing that I am always connected to my source there is no way that I cannot because it is in you and I am in you and you are in me and you can never be separated from it there is no place that this source is not it grows everybody's fingernails it beats everybody's Hearts it digests everybody's Foods it opens all the flowers and you're always connected to it and finally the last principle I call wisdom is avoiding all thoughts which weaken you you know every thought has an energy just like everything else in the universe and if you have a thought of Shame it will weaken your muscles and what is your heart but a muscle if you raise a child who believe in shame and feel ashamed of themselves every time they think that shameful thought they will be weakened and if you have a thought of fear and if you have a thought of stress and you have a thought of Anguish and anxiety all of these thoughts and many more are the thoughts that will always weaken you when you are having a thought that you know is it disempowering you shifted shift it to one that is empowering rather than disempowering and the thoughts that Empower our thoughts of neutrality and willingness and love and ultimately thoughts of divinity and when you see a troubled person who is out there struggling at the highest level of unity Consciousness or God consciousness spiritual consciousness you recognize yourself in all that you see there but for the grace of God go I and I am connected to that person changing your thoughts I appeared on the tonight's show many years ago several times quite a few times and I remember coming home from The Tonight Show and I was walking along the beach and they had taped the show the night before and I was out for a walk and a woman who lived in uh the Northeast stopped me and she said didn't I see you last night how could you be here I said well I flew the red eye and I was walking along and she said you know we're moving down here she said what do the people like here what's it like and I said to her I said well what are they like where you live she said well she said I I live in a very big city and she said they're very pushy and people are not very kind and they don't have time for you and she said it's really not very pleasant she said that's one of the reasons I'm leaving there I said well that's pretty much what you're going to find here that's basically what the people are like here on the way back on the same day someone else who had seen me the night before on The Tonight Show who had lived in the Midwest stopped me and ask me almost the same question she said you live here I said yes she said what my husband and I are moving here and we're looking for a school she said what are the people like you what's it like here I said what are they like in in Chicago where you live she said oh she said it's the Midwest she said people are very friendly they're open they open their homes to you they're very loving they're very kind she said it's a wonderful place she said I love that I'm going to really miss that I said that's pretty much what you're going to find here it's what you expect it's what you think about that expands it's what Emerson taught us the ancestor to every action is a thought change your thoughts and you change your world change your expectations and you change around what you begin to manifest and see showing up in your life you are the sum total of all the choices that you've made up until now and anything about yourself or your life that you don't like or isn't working or is immobilizing you is to be looked at in terms of can I grow rather than why did I do it or isn't this wrong see the two ways to motivate yourself are deficiency motivation which says where I am I don't like I don't like what I've done I don't like the fact that I can't do this well or I can't do that well so I will list these things in my own repertoire and then I will be constantly trying to repair those deficiencies always assuming that I'm deficient that there's something wrong with me and I'm trying to fix it and when you do that you spend your whole life doing that and you never arrive because your life becomes a series of trying to get someplace else and it is if you follow that if you live that if you behave that then what you what happens to you is you become a person who will always suffer from this disease called more you always have to have more because whenever you are getting where you want to go let's say you want a hundred thousand dollars in the bank and you work and you struggle and you deny yourself and you do all of those things and you finally finally you get there and here you are you got a hundred thousand dollars in the bank all of this stuff over here is of course to your life and that is all you know that's what you know how to that's how you are that is your being that is your way of being so that when you do get here what you will do is say this is not enough you must a No Limit person is never operating from deficiency or from lack in their life they're never saying I don't have enough you see you're never going to get enough you already are everything you're everything that you need think of it for just a moment everything that you need to have total Bliss Perfection of your life you already are you already have it you came into this world with nothing that's how you're going out and the time that you have here what you have is your uniqueness your specialness and you don't need anything else now think on this if you don't know how to appreciate what you have and where you are in your life you don't need anything else because if you do get something else you won't know how to appreciate that either you'll just want more or you'll want it to be different or you want it to be the way it used to be or you'll want someone else to be the way you think they should be successful people or No Limit people or self-actualizing people or interdirected people however you whatever labels that have been put on them by great thinkers and philosophers and therapists and people that have looked at human beings these kinds of people are people who always have enough there are some people if you invite them over and you say um you know I'd like you to uh I'd like you to come over tonight and I'd like you to stay over if you can instead of having to drive back and they'll say well can you say can you stay and say well I don't know if I can stay or not um well you could sleep on the cot oh no no I could never sleep on the cot I can't sleep on cots I got a sciatica don't you know and I have I have back pain and cots no that's out of the question I couldn't sleep when I got and what about breakfast well we don't have any food but um we have some old grapefruit that are in the uh in the refrigerator they have a few spots on them oh no I could never eat grapefruit in spots no thanks I can't eat grapefruit spots I just couldn't do that you know uh and these are people who uh never have enough they are are not able to be flexible and to change and there are other people if you say would you like to sleep over we've got a place in the sewer hey that'd be great I can handle that no problem I slept there before it's all right okay all we have is grateful oh I love grapefruit well we got we've got spots on oh I really like grapefruit spots those are terrific I'll I'll go for those there are some people who can handle anything not because their circumstances are different you see your circumstances have very little to do with your fulfillment in life very little it's it's how you're approaching your circumstances it's your attitude towards your circumstances that make all the difference in the world and taking what you are and accepting it I gotta show you this I don't know if the camera can get this this is a little uh advertisement that was in the Detroit Free Press uh for uh last September I was giving a speech at the Unity Church of today in Detroit and it says uh Dr Wayne Dyer will talk about your inner child and how to deal effectively with problems in all relationships and it was a real nice ad you can see that then on top of the ad in the same paper there's another ad and the ad says face it right on top of Maya there's no hiding from hair loss and they got a picture of a guy well a box over his head and they have a before and after guy there and the after guy looks like he's just found fulfillment and it says you can't run and you can't hide hair loss is a problem and unless you take action it will continue now we've got to look at this uh in terms of uh what I can do with this and how I can handle it see my daughter helped me with being bald a long time ago she said dad you're not really bald don't think of yourself that way she said you're just about this much taller than your hair that's all just sort of a nice way to look at it too I just sort of outgrew my hair sort of transcended my hair if you will all right No Limit people are human beings who take what they are and accept it and don't tell themselves that somehow they're deficient because of anything about themselves this is a very crucial uh concept for for me and for virtually all of us it's this idea of taking your life in your own hands and being the kind of person that you choose to be and understanding that everything that comes your way is an opportunity is a blessing and it wasn't until I learned how to celebrate virtually everything that came my way that I was able to transcend it you see everything that was given to us by God whatever that is is perfect no one can deny the mountains are perfect and the rivers are perfect and the birds are perfect and the hippopotamuses are perfect and and and so on this is just what was given to us everything else that you have on our planet that we have on our planet comes about as a result of thinking thinking thought makes it so all right this microphone comes about as a result of thinking somebody imagines it somebody then tells somebody else and it and it creates it the dress that you're wearing this shirt that I'm the shoes that you have the stage these cameras everything that you see that wasn't given to us was created by man as a result of the way that we think the way that we think so what gets inside of us as a cell comes about as a result of the way that we choose to think in our lives very important principle to understand because once you get a hold of thinking and that it creates everything that you have in your life you can change and make it is absolutely perfect as you want it to be because thought makes it so creative visualization is what we're talking about here you the imagery or the image that you have of anything in your life is really like mental Behavior it's like going out and practicing if you go out and practice with a basketball shooting uh free throws over and over again that's physical practice imagery is mental practice it's mental behavior when you have an image that you can succeed at something when you have an image that you can do it rather than that you can't do it when you get into your car and you have an image that you're going to find a parking place rather than that there'll be no place to park so you're not looking for no place to park you will start acting on the image that you have very much like you will start acting on the practice that you have when you're shooting baskets or when you're hitting a forehand or or working on your soup or anything else that you're doing Bucky Fuller who I served with on the hunger project advisory Council for nine years who died not too long ago said that 99 percent of who you are you can't touch you can't see you can't smell 99 of you is Untouchable unsmellable invisible it is what kankai's has called your your conscious awareness it's your it's what looks out behind those eyeballs what is that it isn't it isn't cells it's some kind of conscious awareness that you are and make no mistake about it you've occupied a whole lot of bodies already now this is not reincarnation talk although I don't know about this reincarnation people ask me if I believe in it I said well I taught in a junior high school in the inner city of Detroit for four years and I saw those dead bodies come to life every day at three o'clock so I believe in reincarnation all right now if what you if 99 of who you are you can't touch and you can't feel and you can't smell then where did it what is it who is it where are you what is this thing called your essence or who you are and where does it go now think of this you were in a body I have a little baby girl who's 11 months old and she and we were all in a body that size well it's only a body about this big got fingers only this long you know got a tiny tiny little Parts all over the place I mean she's only this tall now is that her is that her essence because I have other children who are much older and I am much older than that and I can remember being three and being in a different body still me still my Essence they're different but totally different doesn't even look anything like when I was 11 months old and then I was 13 and had a funny body at 13. but still my Essence was there and a whole new body hair is growing all over the place that I didn't understand all kinds of things happening to it you know then hair is falling out of it later on you know looking at those hairs that fall out and say what held it in yesterday you know what I don't know I don't even understand that okay and so it's like who I am has been in many many bodies already all right and that essence you see everything on our planet that is alive can never die but can never die life doesn't die it just transforms it just moves on to new places and new ways of being new ways of being and the way of being that is the most Transcendent of all is this way that comes from seeing yourself as love and only having that to give away only having that to give away let's say I would have stand up here in front of you and just visualize for a moment that I have an orange and I take this orange and I squeeze it as hard as I can squeeze it okay what's going to come out Jews what kind of juice oh is it apple juice any chance once in a while come on now and then little mango juice come out of an orange once in a while no mistakes right never no matter what next question everybody passes these are easy okay why when you squeeze an orange as hard as you can squeeze it does orange juice come out because that's not because it's an orange because that's what's inside isn't it on our planet when you squeeze something what comes out of it is what's inside not too difficult all right does it matter if your mother squeezes the orange does it matter what instrument she uses does it matter if you just had your period and then you squeeze an orange doesn't matter if your boss squeezes it how about if your kids do it your kids squeezing does it matter does it matter what time of day suppose they do it at noon all right how about at four in the morning does that matter whenever you squeeze an orange the only thing you get out is what's inside right no arguments same thing works for you same principle works for you it's a principle of the universe all right someone squeezes you that is someone puts pressure on you someone says things about you that you don't like someone puts uh uh attention on you whatever your boss says something to you that you don't like and out of you comes anger and out of you comes hatred and out of you comes fear or out of you comes stress or out of you comes tension why is it because of your boss and the way they squeeze you never is it because of your mother I mean she really can be a pain sometimes right is it because of your children no what comes out of you always when someone squeezes you is what's inside this is the the vital principle of being a No Limit person it's so crucial to get this and understand that that if you have any hatred in your heart for anyone in this world or any anger or any fear or any of those things it has nothing to do with the rest of the world it only has to do with what you put inside now how does what gets inside of you get there that's the key how does it get there as you think only as you think you see there's no anger in the world there's no stress in the world there's no tension it's perfect we've already established it's perfect place it works just fine it's all flowing the way it's supposed to flow the evidence for it is it is that's all the evidence you need just look around you everything out there is a miracle everything including you there are no mistakes it's all perfect and everything that happens to you in your life whether it's a trauma whether it's a disease whether it's somebody treating you in a certain way there's a lesson in all of it no limit people understand the lesson in life and therefore celebrate the lessons it's true and when you get to that point in your life where you're not cursing the things that come your way and blaming the things that come your way and particularly blaming it on somebody else and you hear it all the time she hurt my feelings how's that possible how can anybody hurt your feelings your feelings come from your thoughts no one can hurt your feelings without your consent no one can make a fool of you without your consent no one can embarrass you without your consent these are choices that you have that come from the way that you think someone calls you a name hey stupid and you turn around I didn't even tell anybody I was coming how did they know that huh person who called you a name instead of saying that's just their opinion that's just where they are that's where they are on the path and it's okay all of you are in relationships right everybody has a relationship of some kind or another in your relationship you have any problems any of you have relationship you don't have any problems I'd like you to take this microphone I want to sit down and listen to you everybody in a relationship has problems don't they right now when you say I'm in a relationship I got problems therefore there's something wrong something's really wrong all right now if you're in a relationship and you have problems and something is wrong you got to call in a consultant right you got to call in somebody to help you with the problems you don't want the problems to go on who are you going to call in you only got yourself it's all you got you might get a therapist once in a while but they got worse problems than you do the only consultant who can help you with your problems is you and who is that consultant that you're calling in we've already established that there's something wrong with that person right something wrong so now you're going to call in a disabled person to deal with your problems in your relationship right now this is a really sick approach to curing your problems you got somebody who says we got a problem you don't talk to me I didn't talk to you and you came home with last week and this week I called you and you didn't call and I was supposed to call you and then you didn't do it and how can you do that now this is the consultant you're calling excuse me will you come in and help us that's the person you got to deal with your problems all right now what you can do is you can change all of that around you can say I'm in a relationship we got problems there's nothing wrong with that that's the way things are you know my problem is that you are different than I am and you think differently than I do and you behave differently than I do and you smell different than I do and you have all of these attitudes over here that I don't have nothing wrong with that that's the way it is when two people get together in a relationship you don't have two people becoming one if you do that then what you end up with are two half persons who wants a half a person in a relationship you always are single even if you're married and for you know and involved in relationship through you're still always single you're still always you your unique special perfect self that is not trying to love but who is love who lives love who is being love the same as if you pray to God and say God will you please help me with my problems and want God to do it for you never have you've got to be God not be afraid to carry God around inside of you if you want to get healed you have got to understand that you're not going to get healed if you are asking someone else to heal you and ask any doctor that you know any surgeon particular who's taking somebody into surgery and ask them which person has a better chance of living a surviving say serious surgery is it the one who has a will to live or is it the one who's just given up and the surgery and the cases are exactly the same all right but the person who has that will which we can't Define you can't go out and get a bucket full of Will and bring it in there it's an attitude it's an approach it's a belief all right that you can do something and when you have that belief about yourself then you know you've got so much better opportunity to be well in your life and a belief is everything I don't know if you've ever thought of that I watched a little girl five years old learning how to swim and she's holding on to the edge of the pool and she wants to get over here to the steps and it's just uh five feet or six feet and she'll let go into hold on again and she'll let go and she'll hold on again and finally there comes a time when she lets go and goes for it okay you fall boss that you've seen this with your children you've seen and what you ask yourself is in the moment before that when she was holding on and then look at the moment afterwards does she have any different skills let's change yeah the skills are they shouldn't have any new skills these are learning skills in that second what she has is a belief that she can do it and when you believe it when you really just believe that you can do it that's what allows you to swim and when you think about it now do you know how to swim yeah so when you dive into the water you don't think about that you just know when you dive into the water you can swim you don't have any necessary swimming skills or anything like that or when you get on a bicycle you get on you know that you're gonna unless you believe you can't because you've never gone out there and tried it and worked on it and done it told a story of a patient of yours who had that very problem who said she didn't know how to ride a bicycle yeah Gail who came to me many years ago and you know why she said she couldn't ride a bicycle because her mother wouldn't let her get on One Cop Out yeah absolutely and she had these beautiful big white teeth and her mother had always told her you could fall and break your teeth and I wouldn't want that to happen to you so here she was now in her 30s and uh telling me that she couldn't ride a bike and she was in therapy and um I said to her okay let's go she said go where are we going I said well I've got a bicycle downstairs and I'm going to show you how to ride a bike I'm gonna have you teach yourself how to do this and he said look I didn't come here to pay you the kind of money that I'm paying you to have you teach me how to ride a bicycle I came here to find out why I can't I said oh well you're going to need another 30 seconds of therapy easy Okay the reason you can't is because you never got yourself on a bicycle and until you do you never will know how and you just believe that you can't oh that's the end of that there's no more to talk about that now what we have to do is get you to get out there and we went downstairs and I it was a woman's bike and I've helped a lot of people to teach themselves how to ride a bike and what you do when you teach you help someone to teach themselves how to ride a bike because you don't teach anybody how to ride a bike okay uh is you let them do it all themselves you let them hold it you let them balance it you let them move with it you let them put the pedal down and and move it themselves and you stand back you say no when you're ready you know and then you're moving and you hold on for a second then you put your foot back down and you you practice it and practice and practice that all yourself you know it was just someone encouraging you and before long in just a matter of minutes when I tell you it was minutes and this woman had never been on a bicycle before she rode like two blocks on a bicycle she couldn't believe that she she now had a belief being to me means seeing the greatness and the uniqueness in you and never letting anybody else convince you to the contrary when people ask me come on you're always talking about being up and you're always positive and so on you mean to tell me that you're always that way this is I say yeah yeah I really am and it isn't because I'm out there doing something in an artificial way it's an authentic response to my heaven having gotten the junk out of me and the junk is the way that I used to think the way that I used to think think for a moment if you can visualize right here a clock a big clock and the hands on the clock go from 1 to 12. the clock starts right out here with the minute hand and it goes over towards the three the hour hand minute hand and that's the time in your life when you are moving away from yourself from your true self that's the time when you are trying to put other people down trying to prove that you're bigger or better than somebody else trying to make yourself right all the time as opposed to uh being with somebody else it's like you're moving away and a lot of people spend a lot of time moving away from their true self because your true self is this little child it's this beautiful little child inside of you that has only love and acceptance for everything in the world and no dis-ease no absence of ease you move away towards the three and then you move down here this way and you're still moving away from yourself until you hit the six the six is the point in your life symbolically metaphorically here when you are the furthest away from yourself that you can be it's the low point in your life it's the point where many people break down or many people break down their relationships or they they feel full of Despair they feel full of hatred whatever it may be and a lot of people die then a lot of people are put into hospitals then a lot of people have to really seek out therapy then and so on and when you're at that thing there's another part of the clock that goes from six to twelve that I think of as the living in the light and this is when and see this clock hand never can go back it can't go back it can only go this way it only goes this way as does life it only goes this way forward in this period This Place between 6 and 12 that's when you start coming back to yourself that's when that's what enlightenment is that's what that's the pathway to Enlightenment when you send out that stuff that is destroying you that is killing you in one way or another and you move yourself back over here and eventually you get yourself all the way back this is the light over here this is the place where you can't go back you'd be tempted you might be tempted to steal you might be tempted to to to use anger you might even slip a little bit and you catch yourself I can just not too long ago there was uh we we got a problem with our sprinkler at uh in my home one of the sprinkler heads is off and if you ever seen that happen you get a gusher going up there and I've been wanting to get that thing replaced for the longest time and I'm walking out of the bank and there's a sprinkler head right there in front of the bank now I practically own this Bank okay so I'm gonna go there every day and I do a lot of business with this bank and I'm looking at the sprinkler head and I think you know all I have to do is just unscrew this thing I wasn't honorary they'll replace it tomorrow morning it's it's 98 cents or whatever so I actually get down there and I and I start turning the sprinkler and then I start thinking do I want this Karma you know do I want the do I want to steal do I want to take I know it's only a 99 and if I went into the bank they'd probably give me one anyway if I asked them and I turn and I just turned it back and I said if I want a sprinkler head I'll go and buy one for myself this doesn't belong to me it was just like a split second of weakness there or whatever but it Illustrated to me that I can't go back there I could never and there was a time in my life when I could have done that I can be absolutely Frank with that I could do that uh I can't go back there anymore that's where you start that's the place to start because when you get all of that out when that's all gone and I mean gone and it only comes about as a result of the way that you think so it's just changing around your approach to life the way that you think in life when that starts to go away what you've become filled up with is what your natural self is which is this loving accepting not fighting the universe but instead living in it and going with the flow and all of the kinds of cliches that you've heard a thousand times it is that's the metaphor there and you see every time you try to go back can't do it you can't do it and the ingredients that make for a No Limit life are five in my opinion the first is quality rather than appearances you begin to change your thinking from appearances and how things look and how other people view me okay because every time you find yourself upset in life about anything that anyone else has said what you're really saying is what you think of me is more important than what I think of me all right so you change from appearances to what I call Quality thinking quality what is the quality of my life rather than how does it appear to others now do you tell yourself that because my friends don't like me that that means there's something wrong with me now that's see that's what you have to learn that another person's opinion is just that it's their opinion and that's all it is every time you are upset or your children are upset because of what somebody else says about them including their peers what you are really saying in that moment and this is really important what you're saying is what you think of me is more important than what I think of myself and you must never give anybody that kind of power and control over you because they will always have it the funny part about approval for those of you who really want it and real now I'm here to tell you that I like approval I enjoy it I find it one of the most exciting things in the world I like it when people read my books I love it when people applaud I like it when people uh tell me nice things and all I like approval I'm the first one to admit it what I don't do is I don't need approval there's a big difference between wanting approval and needing approval when you need approval it means you become immobilized when you don't get it from making other people's opinions more important now for those of you who say yeah but I want approval and I need it and if I don't get it and so on then understand this the people who get the most approval in life are the ones who care the least about it and the ones who get the least approval are the ones who are always going after it so if you want approval in this paradoxical way that I'm talking about it stop needing it stop concerning yourself about ask yourself who gets the most approval in life think of the person that gets the most approval and you'll see that that person couldn't care less what other people are thinking they're so busy being they don't have time to notice what their neighbors are doing Thoreau said this he said if you advance confidently in the direction of your own dreams and Endeavor to live the life which you have imagined you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours what that means is that success is not something that you can get in life success is an inner process success is something that you bring to everything you do in your life it isn't something you get out of what you do and when you get that and you learn how to get the junk out and Advance confidently doing what makes the most amount of sense to you based on your inner signals and the one issue of morality which is you never interfere with anybody else's right to do the same each person has their own right to advance confidently in the direction of their own dreams and when you violate that you're violating the principle of the universe the essence of the universe which is cooperation and harmony then success will begin to chase you and it will come into your life and arrive in your life in amounts that you never dreamed of before that you never dreamed of things will start happening to you that you would never imagined before I'm working on a book right now that's going to be called you'll see it when you believe it when you start believing and some of these principles you'll start seeing things that you were blind to for so long when you were back here in the two and the three and the four and the five when you were moving away from yourself as long as you're moving back towards your Universal Essence your harmony with yourself your cooperation with the rest things will start happening in ways that you never dreamed up Jung called it uh synchronicity and we it's a term that we use to to explain how unexplainable coincidences sort of happen in our life and how come these things happen I'm going to share a couple of those with you before we leave the the quality versus appearance in your life means that you get that inner candle flame working in a way that gives you quality independent of what other people think of you Maslow in defining self-actualizing No Limit people said they are independent of the good opinion of other people of the good opinion of other people independent of it they're so busy advancing confidently doing the things that make sense and bringing success to changing their baby's diaper and bringing success to weeding their Garden and bringing it to the job they bring it on the airplane so that when they run into somebody who is who is rude to them a stewardess That is rude they don't see it as an attack on them it's just where they are and they send them love help them a little bit you know they're kind when somebody wants to get in on the freeway and their uh one old Temptation when they were on the one to the sixth side was to say oh yeah nobody's getting in front of me I'm getting there first it's like I slowed down a little bit they don't have all that type A stuff of having to beat somebody else and having to defeat somebody it is it's a new way of being it's a way of quality where your Harmony allows you to cooperate and you are a part of what this whole thing is about new way of being quality rather than appearances another new way of being very important living your life on ethics rather than rules ethics rather than rules all these rules all these ways of having to do things somebody else dictates to them do you know that some of the most immoral acts in the world have been perpetrated in the name of the rules these are the laws what do you think Nazi Germany was all about everybody doing all these horrible things to other people I'm only doing my job was the defense we all heard at Nuremberg I was just doing my job if it's an immoral rule it's immoral to obey it and self-actualizing people as Maslow tells us have rules inside of them that they could never obey never disobey ever and they have to do with ethics how you treat people how do you think we get to where we are now you know who Rosa Parks was the woman in the South the black woman in the South who said not today I'm not going to the back today no way I know what the rules are the rules were all over the place if you didn't need if you needed a reminder there were signs every place colored in the back white in the front and she said no I'm sitting here and that made all a difference ethics not rules when your children start disobeying rules that need to be disobeyed don't be surprised when I was in the service they had a policy on Guam where I was stationed which would not allow the guamadian civilians to shop in the px's and the Navy exchanges but they did allow all other civilians to shop in the Navy exchanges and px's but if you were glomanian that is if your skin was dark and your eyes were shaped a little different then you couldn't a clear outright violation I was a serviceman I was in the Navy I was a Communications cryptographer they had a newspaper on the Guam daily news and it said an invitation to speak your mind [Music] there was a letter writing contest and they offered 75 dollars to the first prize winner 75 this was 1961. that was a fortune to me that was a month's pay in the Navy at that time almost So I entered the contest and I knew I would win it I had already written a novel at that time a whole novel I'd written while I was on Guam I knew it wasn't going to be a contest I felt sorry for the other people entering it I knew I was going to win this unfortunately I didn't realize that when you're in the service and you have an opinion and you don't submit it to the chain of command that you can be court-martialed for that so the headlines on next week's Guam Daily News where U.S sailor a sales policy of discrimination big hot stuff all right and I was called before a vice admiral Commander Naval forces Marianas Islands and threatened with a court martial because I had disobeyed the rules even though the rule was immoral there are lots of them like that and when I went in and they threatened me with the court martial I told him this was my battle plan they didn't have Xerox machines in those days so I had to get a lot of carbon paper I wrote a letter to the president John F Kennedy and I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy and I wrote a letter I was my hometown was Detroit I wrote a letter to the Detroit news and a letter to the Detroit Free Press telling them what was happening to me as a result of just expressing my opinion about an immoral act that was going on over here on Guam and I showed the naval uh vice admiral my letters right there I said I've only sent the one to the president and the secretary of the Navy these letters go to the newspapers across the country there's one there to the New York Times as well in the Los Angeles time it was uh and I just spread them out before him I said if you Court martial me punish me in any way for this then what's going to happen is the world is going to find out about this policy and I'm prepared I'm ready I can handle it and I was 20 years old at the time or 21. not only did I get a blessing from that because all things come in blessings for you I got out 90 days early and they stamped on my record Pi because the president took it up and sent it to the secretary must have and I never heard from him but I uh the pi on your record means political influence and they don't like anybody with political influence in the military and as soon as they saw that they said this is somebody we probably will be uh giving a discharge real soon there was no there was no court martial and in September of 1962 a brand new policy was initiated on Guam which allowed any civilian to shop in the Navy exchanges and it came about as a result of someone saying these rules are immoral and therefore it's immoral to obey them new ways of being ethics rather than rules and when your kids want to know why how come these rules are so stupid how come we have to do this encourage them to change them my mother always did that she would have to help me get out of the out of the messes that I got myself into because I I did it in my impetuous youth I would just when they would say to me what's more important your job or school I was just honest I said to my job of course that's how I felt in those days but what you do put out in the world is exactly what's coming back to you and if you find things coming back to you that you don't like and don't understand don't ask yourself why these things are coming to you ask yourself what you're doing to make them come back to you and when you start putting the responsibility on yourself you'll start seeing dramatic changes dramatic changes a new way of being instead of Ethics instead of rules ethics a new another new way of being instead of looking all your life for achievements and externals try living your life on knowledge for the sake of knowledge knowledge instead of achievement for the sake of knowledge being in a in a context in which you don't have to collect a lot of merit badges you don't have to collect a lot of a lot of awards and other people's uh value judgments that you go to school or you go out into the world or you read or whatever it is you do because it makes sense to you not because of what somebody else is going to put on a transcript or where you're going to appear in a class list we need to help our children to understand and value the importance of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and doing things that make sense rather than taking the easy way knowledge rather than always trying to achieve we're in an achievement-oriented society which tells us that we evaluate and judge a human being based upon how many achievements he has but most of the people who get caught up in that trap and are always in this circle of trying to get ahead trying to always get ahead their reward for that almost always is higher blood pressure ulcers early deaths and even things like cancer we're beginning to find out are related to kinds of stresses that we have and remember it's a perfect Universe there's no stress in it there's only people thinking stressful thoughts and when you put that pressure on yourself to always achieve and get ahead of the other guy you miss what it's really all about there's nothing wrong with goals it's falling in love with them that's the problem it's not being able to be flexible and be alter them if you have a goal to get here to get a hundred thousand dollars in the bank to get to this promotion to get two cars in your garage whatever it is that your goal is and you're on your way to that and you're always working at the goal all of this stuff on your way to the goal is called striving and that's what you learn striving striving is a very low level place to be when you get to your goal because all you've ever known is striving you will just always suffer from this disease called more you will just upgrade your goal to two hundred thousand dollars for cars and two houses and another wife and a younger one and and all of these kinds of things if you have a goal and you understand that every step along the way is the present moment to enjoy and to live then the goal won't become any Obsession I don't have any goals in my life people ask me where are you going to be five years from now what are you going to be doing what's next for you I just uh I remember what Lincoln said who to me was like the greatest person who ever sat in that white house he said I've never had a policy he said I just tried to do what made the greatest amount of sense each and every day of my life as I sat there as the President of the United States and I think there's something really significant in that that you don't have to get it all planned out and follow a certain pattern and do it a certain way if you just sort of trust your inner instincts and go with that and live each moment the goal stuff will all take care of itself but if you're sacrificing and pushing your life aside and and suffering on your way to trying to get someplace you'll never get there it will always elude you because once you get there you'll just have to upgrade it and that's because that's all you'll know nowness is that purest form of Sanity living in this moment and enjoying it and all the rest of it will sort of work its way out another new way of being for me is to think of yourself in terms of personal Authority rather than being an authoritarian personal Authority a person who has authority never needs to dominate anyone else ever dominating doesn't become necessary in business you can have authority the people who have the most Authority are the ones who listen the most and the ones who are the most conscientious about what do other people have to say a person in a relationship who has to dominate somebody else and has to make the other person submissive shows that they don't have authority because they're getting their power not from within for themselves but on the basis of who they can control and that never lasts that never lasts the only thing that lasts is having inner power if you will know thyself that's what Shakespeare said know thyself the more you know yourself the more you the more you become honest with yourself uh honesty becomes just a way of life no I don't think the world necessarily does but you can't run your world you can't run your world based upon what the rest of the people in the world want or don't want to me honesty is like it's a Karma that goes out into the world how people treat you in the world is their karma how you react is yours and what when you react to it with dishonesty that's what you're putting out into the world dishonesty and when you put this honesty out into the world that's what's going to come back to you because what goes out is what comes back that all as you sow so shall you reap I mean it's it's in every great uh institution that there is in the world whether it's a religion or a philosophy or whatever what you put out is what comes back whatever you plant is what you're going to get back and the more that you put out honesty just because it's what you are because you are being honesty you're not trying to be honest you're just being honesty then that's what will come back to you on a regular basis and when it doesn't you'll just see that as another test for you to pass and finally a fifth way of being that is new for me it has become a way of life it's called serenity instead of acquisitions the more you try to acquire the more you try to get the more you try to collect in your life and evaluate yourself on the basis of that the less Serenity you're going to have more is less it's almost a secret of the universe Serenity means inner peace means that you can find joy in every moment that you have in your life instead of always looking for it it means that uh while you are driving along the countryside you know and seeing uh instead of saying uh this is I'm on my way to this point that you can open your eyes and see it with new eyes see see the rolling mountains see the grass see the deer see the sky see you can just stop wherever you are in this second wherever you are and just look around you and you can begin to appreciate just your and your surroundings and your environment then you can begin to appreciate the people that are in your life and even the ones that are negative and and you're having the most difficulty with you can practice a new way of being with them which is sending them love sending them flowers send them books send them a tape send them something and just see what kind of reaction that you get super emotional health is just an attitude an attitude is everything I want to summarize these new ways of being and give you the most important uh ingredient on the path as we leave I said that it's quality in your life to be focusing on rather than appearances and it's ethics rather than rules and it's knowledge rather than achievement all the time and it's being personally an authority on yourself rather than authoritarian and trying to be dominant dominating someone else or to be dominated and serenity which is the name of my little girl my youngest daughter Serena um rather than Acquisitions and accumulations and trying to prove yourself that way and when you get that Serenity which comes from the way that you think always then you will replace all of the other junk that keeps you back here between six and one on that clock and once you pass it once you get past it you'll never ever be able to go back because the light living in the light is a way of it's a way of being that if you're not there you don't get it yet but once you see it and once it begins to and take over your life you can never go back that that is your purpose it isn't your purpose isn't to try to be loving your purpose is to be loved and only have that to give away well but there's one other ingredient and it's really crucial forgiveness is the vital ingredient on the path of enlightenment and if you don't know how to do it and practice sending out love take the person or the people that you're having conflict with any place in your life send them something you don't have to even do it physically just send them something that comes from inside and what's inside is how you choose to think and if you can make that love and do that and that is to me the test not whether you can love someone when they smell good when they do everything that you're supposed to but whether you can love someone who has sent you hate or anguish in your life and send it back you don't have to forget you don't have to go back but you got to get it out of you because it is blocking you and holding you back and when I said you'll see it when you believe it all my life I had wanted to write fiction a parable three four years ago I decided to go off to Hawaii to Maui to kanapali Beach and to write now the books that had met the most difference in my life were a little prince Candide Siddhartha Jonathan Livingston Seagull Illusions Alice Through the Looking Glass Gulliver's Travels Parables teaching Parables stories that can tell a message I went over to Molly and I sat down on the beach and I've been talking about writing this I've been talking about doing this and it was something that I have a little girl and her name is Skye SK y e I decided to reverse the letters in her name e y k s and put an i in there which symbolizes the self icus and I just created this parable of a woman whose name is icus who lives on another planet the planet is Uranus and it's a duplicate mirror image of Earth only icus can only see things as they are now we would like them to be and therefore people are neurotic on Uranus because they have to be she gives the anxiety attack report if you will because anxiety really does attack over there and tells about anxiety coming in on the weekends and so on well my visitor in my Parable goes to Uranus mitikus she cannot understand as he describes Earth why people would be neurotic by choice on Earth why would anybody be unhappy or depressed or miserable when they don't have when anxiety doesn't attack and when elevators really don't scare you and when if you want a complex on Uranus you want to give a complex to your wife you go to the store and buy one and she says what happened well my husband gave me a complex you know and it's true whereas on Earth if you have a complex it's because you've chosen to have one so you can't figure it out okay so she comes here observes our people and begins to see the secrets of the universe and gives us these secrets talks to the top leaders in our field and that was my Parable and I wrote it and she gives all these wonderful Secrets some of which I've been talking about here today but what I want to tell you is that my wife gave me a license plate and the license plate says I kiss okay it's a vanity play and I was pumping gas on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale Florida and a little man from Greece came up to me and he said but means this fias uh which is how you say that in Greek and I said well that's just a word it's my daughter's name spelled backwards it's a parable that I wrote he said no he said in Greek that's a word so what could that word be he said it means best wishes for all you'll see it when you believe it the great big erroneous Zone The Cosmic erroneous Zone if you get this one you'll have it and understand it all there is no way to happiness happiness is the way we live in a celebrity obsessed world only look at me notice me the dial teaches something completely the opposite listen to the 66th verse of the Dao water again the sea stays low and because the sea stays low all of the rivers and all of the streams empty into it because it stays humble because it stays in that place of just allowing everything to come to you he was trying to teach us the important lesson of letting what we know is coming come to us I practice this so much more now in my life than I did at one time I can remember years ago I was uh I had written a book called your aronia sounds back in the 70s and um and it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for something like 27 months and each many weeks it would be number one and then it would go down to number three and then it would go to them or two and down to seven and all of that and I was doing The Tonight Show in those days on a regular basis and so many of the other shows the Merv Griffin and the Phil Donahue and Dinah Shore I became like a regular on the diner show I was like you know hobnobing with Bert Lancaster folks and you know just the and um what you do is you call and find out where you appear on the uh on the bestseller list for the following week on Wednesday so you call up on Wednesday not for the Sunday coming up but for the following week and I called home and my ego was pretty strong and I was very much into a lot of notice me I I really believe that true nobility is is not about being better than anyone else now it's it's about being better than you used to be and I think I'm better than I used to be and just about I mean I know that I'm better than I used to be in every quality or every characteristic that I hold to be valuable um but in those days I was into notice me and I called home and I had trained my wife to call the New York Times she had this special number that she could call and with a certain code and she could find out where I was going to appear on the bestseller list the following week so I called her up and I said where am I on the best seller next next week you know out in California doing something and she said you're not on the best seller list I said what are you talking about I was number one on the bestseller list last week I said my even my voice changed what do you mean I'm not on the best seller this she said you're not on the best seller list I'm sorry she said your book is I'm the best seller [Music] distinction there isn't it between believing that this is me and recognizing that you can let go a little bit of of that listen to uh verse 66 of the Dao why is the Sea King of a hundred streams because it lies below them humility gives it its power that's a very important principle to understand and I live on the ocean right next to it it's my front yard and always I watch it to learn something from this thing called the ocean which is the most powerful source of life that we have on the planet without it there's no life on this planet and because it stays low so what does this have to say to us do you have the capacity to get past that ego need to always be saying notice me look how important I am I mean there's been a proliferation of this lately with this celebrity silly stuff isn't it I mean CNN is doing you know full hour shows on uh on silly little things about what happened to this particular celebrity or what happened to that celebrity and the celebrities never even done anything and it's there's all of this talk about it and all of the new magazines I mean and you look you go into it through an airport and you look on the newsstand and all the same photos just with different magazines I don't even know what what the names of all of them are but there's like this huge market now that we have for people to get into a state of notice me Notice Me notice me and how much do we train our young people particularly in our schools and so on that the one who is the star is the one who gets the most attention the one who is uh the most important and the most valuable is the one that has uh the most people liking them and so on this constant obsession with needing to be noticed when in fact what I have found for myself is the the happiest moments of my life are when I can do it low and slow and not have anybody out there even know what I'm doing to be able to I mean Louise never would have uh advertise the fact of some of the things I talk about with her generosity she does it anonymously it's almost always done in those ways no look at me look and notice me how important I am and so on so much to learn from that kind of wisdom from that kind of interconnection to the Dao the ability and the willingness to say to do it anonymously to say that you can just get done almost anything that you want to get done if you don't become obsessed with taking credit for it remember the movie The Magnificent Obsession the movie made back I think in the 50s and it was really about what was the Magnificent Obsession it was the ability to be able to give anonymously what is Alcoholics Anonymous it is everybody stays Anonymous nobody has a title there's not even anybody in charge there's nobody there's no leaders of this there's no president there's no vice president there's no organization there's no it's just here's here's a group of people who just want to help other people whose lives are out of control so here's a meeting place and you come and some one day somebody will will chair it and then somebody else another day will share it and one of the things I found and when I attend one of these meetings um is that I I feel you'll see so many people who are down trodden who feel as if their life has passed them by who look like they don't have any teeth they haven't shaved they're they're dirty they're um God in Disguise Mother Teresa was asked the question about what she does when she was in Calcutta and she said every day every day I see Jesus Christ in all of his distressing disguises all of his distressing disguises that you can see this Source you can see the dial you can see it when particularly in those who are the most obscure the most uh isolated from everyone else and whenever I go to one of those meetings and I hear people get up and they tell their stories they I I always I feel that I feel there's so much presence of the source of God of spirit of Lao Tzu of this of the sort of Dao whatever you want to call it in one of those meetings than I've ever felt in any church I've I've never felt the presence of it more and I encourage you any of you watching this right now go to one of those meetings you don't have to be an alcoholic you don't have to I'm not an alcoholic I don't call myself an alcoholic I was never out of control I drank but I wasn't out of control and I uh but I still go to those meetings I have people in my own family that have struggled with addiction and I go with them and I sit there and I listen to those stories and I just I get shivers down my back when I think about how beautiful it is to be in the presence of people all they want to do is help each other there's a movie called my name is Bill W ow James Woods playing Jim Carr James Garner isn't it and uh he his life just got totally out of control with addictions totally out of control and then he went to a uh uh he he went to one of these meetings and he began to realize and he said we can we can actually take these uh these people and all we have to do is all we have to do is love them all we have to do is and he's so excited about the concept of being able to go out there and and offer it and I keep referring to Louise because she's such a hero to me um there was a time back in the 80s when our president wasn't even able to say the word AIDS was he I mean he could come on and here was this lady who before this thing became the worldwide phenomenon that it is was having meetings in her own house and going and bringing these people these downtrodden people who had been labeled outcasts in society and offering them a place to learn how to love each other and to care for each other this was long before there was any celebrity State status associated with trying to end this horrible crisis that our country has and our world has had there was uh James Wood so excited about the idea of we can create a place where we're Anonymous nobody has to know anything about us we don't have to say our names we don't have to say anything we just have to come there and we can help each other and before that happened everybody who got out of control with addictions particularly with alcohol would would die there was no cure there was no cure and where did they find their cure they found it in being anonymous they found it in being obscure they found it in having no organization they found it in having no elected representative they founded it having no rules there are no rules you just come and we care if you've been one day or one hour sober or even if you're drunk you come we care about you and you are not that alcohol who you are is this Divine soul in the 36th verse of the doubted Ching it says the gentle Outlast the strong the Obscure outlasts the obvious try to become a little more obscure a little less interfering a little less notice me a little less you know one of the specific kinds of things that you can do is just as you're about when somebody else is talking just as you're about to interject what you've been thinking about for the whole time waiting for them to stop talking just to just stop and to bite your tongue and say tell me more or that's very interesting I have never heard that point of view before even if they totally completely disagree with everything that you stand for to be to be willing to listen to being able to stop practice it I practiced it when I did these verses of the Tao I practice it every single day while I was working on that just staying obscure and for me that's not always so easy because of just being recognized wherever I go and if I saw someone who's about to recognize me I would just put my head I would just walk a little bit past them like something right now I just want to be anonymous right now I want to be obscure the Dao says storms always end verse 23 Fierce Winds Don't Blow all morning a downpour of rain doesn't last all day who does this Heaven and Earth you're already connected to everything you want or need it will come to you at the exact perfect time as the rivers and the streams come to the ocean at the perfect time and place you've got to trust you got to know it's going to come to you you don't have to chase after it you can become a little less obsessed with your ego and your self-importance and who you are and what you've done and you can get so much more done and you know what it's the most peaceful and sweet delicious way it's like the song that Cecilia was singing about the rose there is an energy in the universe there is something that is in each and every one of us and it's also in the universe and you are connected to it in a way that is often uh perceived to be uh oh aloof from us because it's invisible because it's in the world of what we call Spirit the world that is not Material and I would like to suggest that you suspend your disbelief allow yourself to know that you're not a human being here having a spiritual experience but that is the other way around that you're a spiritual being having a human experience and the quality of your Human Experience is really much more dependent upon how you use this invisible intelligence and how you connect to this energy and once you have an awareness that you can never be separate from it that you and it and whatever you call it it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you call it God if you call it divine presence if you call it Soul if you call it spirit if you call it Consciousness if you call it Christ Consciousness you can call it Buddha Consciousness you can call it Louise you can call it Edna you can call it Ralph Alan Watts once said that you can't get wet from the word water it isn't the word that allows you to experience water and whatever it is that you call it is something that is distinct from what it is when I was walking in here this evening on these beautiful grounds I saw some people looking at the flowers and the different plants that were growing and as they were looking at them there was one person who was obviously an expert a botanist of some kind and he was trying to explain to each one of the people what the name was the technical name for each one of the flowers and I was watching that and thinking it doesn't matter what you call it can't you enjoy look at that thing it's orange and it just came out of nowhere there's something very profound about enjoying it and being there with it rather than being obsessed with labeling it there was a very famous Danish Theologian his name was Soren Kierkegaard he once said that once you label me you negate me once you place a label on me and and put me into a compartment or a category of some kind I must then become what it is that you have labeled me to be so that we want to be able to live our lives and to practice principles of higher awareness without being so consumed with what I call ordinary human awareness an ordinary human awareness is just the recognition or the belief system that I am a human being maybe I'm having a spiritual experience I'm not quite sure but higher human awareness but sometimes in the East called City awareness in the west it's been called higher Consciousness or Christ Consciousness there's many names for it but when you get Beyond just knowing yourself as this body and this personality and this thing that you inhabit and begin to realize that who you are is that which was never born and can never die when you recognize your Eternal self and that's what this program is really about it's really about recognizing the power the energy the capacity to be able to do what it says in some of the most holy books that you've ever read that even the least among you can do all that I have done and even greater things and that's not just empty words from holy scriptures that's a very powerful lesson that each and every one of us can practice and live every day what I'd like to suggest to you and what this program is really about is that there are higher levels of awareness that are available to us a level of awareness that allows us to do things like and it may sound a bit strange but to manage the coincidences of Our Lives to be able to place our attention on what it is that we would like to create for ourselves in our lives to literally have the power to know that if I think about it and I keep it there and I keep that picture firm Within Me that there is an energy a source a capacity Within Me that is in the universe and that is also in me and that I can use this energy that I can manage it there are many ways to get the things that we want for ourselves in our lives but basically it all begins with how we choose to think as you think so shall you be seven little words that I think are perhaps the most important things that we can learn and master in our lives this old proverb notion that I become what I think about all day long and once you know that what you think about is what expands you start getting real careful about what you think about you don't allow your thoughts to be on anything that you don't want or that you wouldn't want to have manifest or show up for you in your life Emerson said the ancestor to every action is a thought and you can look at every spiritual tradition whether it's eastern or western whether it's ancient or modern whether it's civilized quote or uncivilized quote whether it's Tribal and there is in all of these Persuasions this idea that inside each and every one of us in a place that is not material in a place that has no dimensions in a place that has no boundaries that in each and every one of us we have this power and we have this intelligence and you can never see it I've often said that when you die if you're going to die and five minutes before you're ready to leave they weigh your body and let's say it weighs oh let's pick a good number 150 pounds all right and then life leaves your body and they weigh your body instantly after you're dead and it still weighs 150 pounds so that your body weighs the same alive or dead before it begins to deteriorate and if that's the case then your life this thing that leaves your body and your body still weighs the same is weightless your life is weightless you can't put a dimension on it you can't put a measure on it Who You Are is that life and that life is not in the dimension of material it's like if I want to wiggle my finger I just have to have a thought and the thought says I think I'm going to wiggle my finger and then I do this and you say well that's really no big deal but it really is a big deal because there's something invisible in here that says I'm going to wiggle my finger I've never seen that I've never been able to you can't you can put that under an x-ray you can try to measure that and find out what it is in there that allows you to say I'm going to wiggle my finger and you can never find it it's not in this world if you will so I can do all the scientific studies and what I can do when I do these scientific studies is I can find the command center inside of me that a lot and I can go to the brain and I can point to a specific point And scientists can do this and say there's the command center which allows you to have a thought I think I'm going to wiggle my finger but there's no computer and there's no scientists and there's no technology that can ever allow us to go inside and say there's the commander in the command center can't find it and that commander in the command center that weightlessness is the part of us that we just don't pay enough attention to and what I'd like to suggest here this evening is that once you start becoming aware of the power of thought and if you look around just look around you at everything that you see it all began with a thought we become what we think about and that is probably one of the most important principles in learning to manifest but in my mind as I think about this idea of getting what you really want and being able to attract it into your life what what we have to look at is basically the obstacles that we have conditioned ourselves and you notice I say that we have conditioned ourselves because I have never believed that we need to be putting the responsibility on someone else if you're conditioned it's because you have allowed yourself to become that and if we are conditioned if we conditioned ourselves to believe certain kinds of things and one of the things that we kind of believe and hang on to and live with is this whole idea that uh all of the things that happened to me in my past are what are keeping me from doing what I'd like to do today so we hang on to these things and we fill ourselves with blame we say I'm the middle child I'm the youngest child I'm the oldest child you know I'm an only child any one of those is a great excuse you know if you're the youngest child you can say well you know I never how could I be making decisions for myself and be a fully a fully functioning person today when I always had somebody else telling me what to do my whole life how could I think for myself if you're the oldest child you can simply say to yourself well how could I be expected to think for myself I always had to think for somebody else I was always doing it for somebody else and that leaves the middle child you know the classic identity crisis oh poor me my mother didn't even know my name she's always calling me by this one's name or that one's name so I don't know where I fit in so that takes care of everybody except the only child and of course the only child wow your parents looked at you and said we won't be doing that again you have to live with that I don't huh so everybody with their birth order or with their mother like their sister better or that we had enough or we didn't have enough or we had too much or we lived in the north we lived in the South I'm Too Tall I'm too short I've got too much hair I don't have enough hair it's falling out it's not falling out whatever it is we all have these excuses and I call all of these things that we hang on to and use to keep ourselves from reaching these higher places in our lives the wake I call it the wake and the wake is uh comes from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time and it's a very powerful story he said your life is like a boat and it's heading up the river at say 40 knots all right and as it's going you are somehow able to metaphorically stand on the stern the back of the boat and look down into the water now there goes your life in this direction and you're standing here and you're looking down into the water and you ask yourself these three questions the first question what is the wake what is it what is this thing that you see and the answer the wake is the trail that is Left Behind that's what it is nothing more nothing less it's the trail that is Left Behind second question to ask yourself in this little metaphor what's driving the boat what's making this thing go in this direction the answer the present moment energy that's being generated by the engine and nothing more that's the only thing that's making the boat go in this direction and in this little scene this means it's the present moment thoughts that I have and how I am using them that is making my life go in this direction and nothing more because the third question is the most important and Powerful question and I've ever ever since I heard it I've always thought about this whenever I have a tendency to look back here and blame something is it possible for the wake to drive the boat that is Hannah trail that is Left Behind make a boat go in this direction and of course the answer to that is no it can't it's just a trail that is left behind and in that trail there are an enormous number of things and every one of us has awake and we have a whole lot of stuff in it and one of the problems that we have is that we have a tendency to look at the wake and all of the stuff that's in it to explain why it is my life isn't working the way I would like it to work so that um you can take a look at the experiences of your life I look at the experiences of my life and the experiences of my life I spent some years in a series of foster homes people have said to me ugh living in a foster home that must have been terrible I said no it wasn't terrible at all when you're six years old you don't wake up every day and say oh my God I'm living in a foster home isn't this awful poor me how come me and nobody else you don't do that you don't do that until you're 40. [Music] and when you're 40 and your life isn't working and you're bankrupt and you're a drug addict and and and you're falling your relationships are all falling apart and your family's leaving you and you say why is this happening to you what do you expect from me I had to live in a foster home my mother liked my sister better we were to this we were to and so it's like we take a look at all of these things in our wake and I'm not saying here that you shouldn't be in touch with your past and all of the things that are back there but to use it as excuses for why you can't get where you'd like to get today is something that you if you do that you will never get to this place that I'm talking about in this program which is this place that I call higher awareness Way Beyond ordinary human awareness one of the most powerful lessons that you can ever learn I had to learn as a Young Man my own father was a man who walked away he left he left home when I was just a baby left my mother was sitting right here 107 years old is that what you know 82 years old though and with three little boys and all I had ever heard when he walked out about this person that my older brothers told me about and that when my mother got her family back together again when I was nine years old and did all that she could to to make a family again with all the hardships this is a man who never made a phone call who never sent a penny who spent some time in prison who is an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver the age of 49 and was buried in a pauper's grave in Biloxi Mississippi and it wasn't until I went to his grave and was able to stand there and I used to dream about this man and have this enormous hatred for this person whom I had never seen just based upon what he had done to my own mother and to my brothers and so on and all of the stories that I had heard and all the research that I had done and I ended up at his grave 10 years after he had died when I finally found out that he was dead it was on the 27th of August it was 1974. and what I did transformed my life what I did is I believe I was sent there by God or whatever you want to call that Divine spirit that divine presence and my life at that time wasn't working I was overweight my relationships weren't working my writing wasn't working there were a lot of things that weren't going well for me in my life at that time not badly but they weren't going at the level that I knew I was capable of getting to because I was filled with this hatred this anger this bitterness and so what I did is I stood there on his grave on this little marker in the ground and I said from now on I send you love I forgive you Mark Twain said that forgiveness is the fragrance that the Violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it and once I let go of that anger and that hatred and all of my attachment to the bonding that I had done with these wounds and let go of that and cleared that out of my life my writing began to take place at a much higher level in fact I wrote erroneous zones in very very short time after that I began to get myself back in shape I began to eat better I began exercising keeping my got my weight down and the people that were supposed to come into my life like my beautiful wife who sits here with me this evening and all of our children some of whom are here this evening all of it was allowed to flow when I released that that energy of negativity and blame and hatred they say that you never die from a snake bite it isn't the bite and you can't be unbitten it's in the wake what kills you is the Venom that continues to pour through you long after the bite has taken place and that's something we have control over and we can't change and I'd like to suggest that what happens is that many of us Bond ourselves to these wounds of our past if I were to cut my hand just cut it and watch it my nature says flows up the wound and I just have to watch it and there's no doctor out there there's no medicine out there that's going to heal that wound there's something there's a healing stream that I am connected to that will allow that wound to heal so my nature says close up the wounds don't bond to them don't hang on to them close them up but supposing I say to myself oh no you don't there's no way I'm going to let you close up you see if I can keep you open and I can go to you and say look at this say what happened wow look at this cut I've got oh you poor thing look at that it seems to be getting worse it's getting infected isn't that terrible and if you practice this kind of a mentality when your nature says close up the wound but you keep it open before long you lose your hand and after that you'll lose your arm and the whole organism will be destroyed if you don't let your nature take over and your nature also says close up the wounds of your past close them up and oftentimes we ignore our nature I had a great teacher that came into my life through his writing his name was nisargadata Maharaja lived in India up until the mid-1980s and he wrote something called I am that which was very powerful and influential in my life and one of the things that he talked about when he was asked the question what's the difference between say a saint or a highly functioning human being a spiritual Master a spiritual teacher and the rest of us is that they have unconditional love in them and you don't or we don't and he said no he said Saints have unconditional love in them and so do you he said the difference between ordinary human awareness and higher awareness people is that they have nothing else inside of them that's all they have and it's almost like we have to learn how to get that in ourselves to be able to well I always like to use a metaphor of an orange I love the orange perhaps living in Florida is why but an orange is a simple metaphor you take this orange and you squeeze it as hard as you can squeeze it and you ask yourself what will come out and what comes out when you squeeze an orange juice never no matter how many times you squeeze it will apple juice come out there's no mistakes you'll never get grapefruit juice out of this thing ever the only thing you'll ever get out of it is orange juice and the next question is why why wouldn't you squeeze an orange as hard as you can squeeze it does orange juice come out and I asked that question up in Toronto one time this little girl sitting right in the front row she said that's dumb it's a she said she said it how you are really smart and she smiled and she thought that was great but that's the truth the reason that orange juice comes out when you squeeze is because that's what's inside now you extend the metaphor and someone squeezes you that is someone says something about you that you don't like someone behaves towards you in a way that you find offensive somebody does something or says something to you that you feel hurt by and out of you comes anger hatred bitterness tension fear anxiety stress and immediately you say the reason that comes out of me is because of how he said it or the way that she said that or because they did that but the truth is the reality is that what comes out is what's inside and if you don't like what's inside you can change it now if you ask me how does orange juice get inside of an orange I would say I don't know I can't figure it out it's a mystery to me I just enjoy the oranges of my life and give God the credit for that a lot of people think that other things make them the way they are they will blame their past they'll blame their parents they'll blame the economy they'll blame the Ayatollah they'll blame somebody for things that are going wrong in their life and one of the favorite things that we have to blame for why I'm upset at a particular moment is something called traffic traffic made me upset and I've always reminded myself when I'm in a gym or when I'm on the freeway and I'm trying to get someplace the traffic doesn't care that you have within you the opportunity in this moment to really work on these things that are perhaps debilitating or creating anxiety or stress in your life that these are tests these are opportunities for you traffic doesn't care your anger is your choice and you can always choose to be the be happy angry depressed miserable upset or you can choose to be fulfilled and do something positive In This Moment it's always up to you I'd like to give you what I think of as the great spiritual teachings of many various Persuasions there's a story that summarizes it it's the story of what I call the four philanthropists in a village the conquerors had come through and they had taken all of the men or many of the men who were warriors at the time and they had placed them into this prisoner of war camp right in the village and many of the villagers knew that their compatriots were imprisoned and the first philanthropist was a person who had great wealth and he went to the people who had the prison and were in charge of it and he said to them I understand the men are not able to have fresh water and cold water I would like to donate all of my earnings and everything that I have to purifying the water for them and making sure that all of them will not be sick and he was granted that and he felt like he had fulfilled his destiny that he had done what he was here for the second philanthropist discovered that the men were sleeping on rocks and that they were cold at night they didn't have blankets and he took all of his funds and he said to them I would like to provide bedding and blankets for the people so that they will be comfortable when they sleep at night and he was granted that right and he donated his money for this purpose and again he felt that he was fulfilling his destiny the third philanthropist discovered that the food that they were eating was inadequate that they were just given uh beans and and water and some bread and so he said I own a farm and I'd like to grow all of my food and I'd like to take this food to all of these prisoners and he was granted that right and all three of these great philanthropists in the village felt that they had really completed their mission for why they were here but the fourth philanthropist was a saint he was living not at ordinary human awareness but at higher Consciousness levels and he went and he found out where the keys were and he went to the prison at night and he released all of the prisoners and this little metaphorical story really tells us that when we are living at ordinary human awareness there's nothing wrong with those who are out there who can help us to suffer in Comfort all right and many of us have learned to do that and accept that and say all right as long as I'm comfortable even if I'm suffering it's okay but there are those who have keys and those keys can open the prisons one of the great teachers in my life was Carlos Castaneda and Castaneda talked about his teacher who was what they call inaugural a and a Native American term that refers to all that is knowable and he his teacher told him that your life is like being born into a a room a mansion if you will that has a thousand rooms but you're born into one room and this one room is called daily human awareness and the only way you can get in is through conception and birth you're in and the only way you can get out we are taught is to die so we spend our lives in this mansion in one room even those there's 999 other rooms we don't know how to get out into those rooms unless we die so we wait to die and what his teacher told him is I can teach you how to get out of the room of daily awareness and into the other 999 rooms and if you stay with me and learn all that I have to give you I can teach you how to get out of the house all together without having to die and what we have to do in order to get to that place where we can take the keys and unlock the self-imposed prisons or the prisons that we have given ourselves on the basis of what we have come to believe is our limitations what we can and can't do we have to let go of that and I call it rewriting our agreement with reality we literally have to make a a whole new contract with what it is that I perceive to be what is possible for me and in order to do that we have to shift out of the things that we have come to believe in and everything that you came to this program watching tonight that you believe in was handed to you by someone else outside of you was handed to you by the experiences or testimony of someone in the past and because it comes from outside of you there is still an element of doubt and this element of Doubt isn't bad but it keeps you from reaching higher levels because what you think about is what expands and if you're thinking doubt then doubt is what expands William Blake said if the Sun and Moon should ever doubt they would immediately go out so how do we get past what we believe in or what has been handed to us and still honor it and be grateful for all of the teachers and all of the people who have come before us so what we have to learn to do is let go of that tribal Consciousness and shift to what I call a knowing now there's a big difference between what you believe and what you know everything that you know is something that you have made conscious contact with conscious contact so there's nobody out there watching there's nobody in this world who knows how to swim who learned it by somebody else telling them that you can swim or by watching Mark Spitz go through the water or by observing other people doing it you may remove some of the doubt but you will never know how to swim until you get in the water and blob around a few times and then do it and then you'll have a knowing and that knowing is something that you'll never lose it's like riding a bicycle or dancing the Macarena or making a lemon meringue pie or anything that you know how to do it's because you've made conscious contact and I'd like to suggest that there's a big difference between knowing about a divine presence knowing about a sacred awareness knowing about God and knowing god there's a big difference just like there's a big difference between knowing about the possibility of being able to heal myself of something that is bothering me perhaps a disease process I perhaps May believe that it's possible because I've read other people and I've heard others say it and I've read the testimony and I've listened to the tapes and I've gone to the seminars but until you have made conscious contact with it you'll never know it and I'd like to suggest there are there's a wonderful poem I'd like to share this poem with you it's written by a wonderful woman her name is Valerie Cox and she lives up in Seattle and she's written quite a bit of poetry this particular poem really speaks to me through the difference between what you know and what you believe in immerse yourself in this in these words a woman was waiting at an airport one night with several long hours before her flight she hunted for a book in the airport shop bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop she was engrossed in her book but happened to see that the man beside her as bold as could be grabbed a cookie or two from the bag between which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene cheap Munch cookies and watched the clock as this gutsy Cookie Thief diminished her stock she was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by thinking if I wasn't so nice I'd blackened his eye with each cookie she took he took one too and when only one was left she wondered what he'd do with a smile on his face and a nervous laugh he took the last cookie and broke it in half he offered her half as he ate the other she snatched it from him and thought Oh Brother this guy has Sumner and he's also Rude why he didn't even show any gratitude she had never known when she had been so galled and sighed with relief when her flight was called she gathered her belongings and headed to the gate refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate she boarded the plane and sank in her seat then sought her book which was almost complete as she reached in her baggage she gasped with surprise there was her bag of cookies in front of her eyes I love that I love that if mine are here she moaned with this bear then the others were his and he tried to share Too Late to Apologize she realized with grief that she was the rude one the ingrate the thief the Cookie Thief and all of us in some ways are cookie thieves I have eight beautiful children our youngest little girls eight years old one of the things that you do when you become enlightened and become a guru like me that'll be the day is when we place something that is important to know where it is we practice mindfulness so that we never misplace anything so obviously having reached this exalted level of awareness in my home with my eight children I never misplace anything So I placed my keys right here in a certain spot but my little girl has this wonderful habit of taking my keys and hiding them I'm daddy in the morning so that she can watch me flip out as I look for the keys and I'll say sage how many times has daddy told you don't hide my keys in the morning daddy you told me not to do it I don't hide your keys anymore come on where'd you put my keys the last time they were in your dial house where did you put daddy you told me not to do it and then of course my 12 year old daughter Serena loves to just assume this stance she's watching me raise my voice she'll say I wonder what all those people would think of Mr positive if they could see him right now get lots of reminders foreign look when I come back out here I want those keys here and I go back and I get my clothes on and I reach in my back pocket and there are my keys right where I had left them the night before in my pocket and there's a fine line I think between being a guru and being a jerk all right and I probably crossed that line more times than I should be admitting here on television but this idea of being a Cookie Thief and creating a knowing a knowing is something I did a benefit uh along with my wife a couple of years ago with a man on Maui whose name is Michael Canal who had been injured in a uh in an accident he's a quadriplegic or paraplegic and at that meeting when I was over there was a a man who lived on another one of the islands who was known as a Kahuna A Healer an ancient healer from Polynesia and he was introduced to me and he said that was a nice talk and so on and I said how do you get to be a Kahuna you know do you take Kahuna 101 I mean what courses do you take how does this work up and he said no he said kahunas are raised to have no doubt to have no doubt to have a knowing and he said when I when a knowing confronts a belief in a disease process The Knowing will always Triumph and that knowing is something in which you say you are healed and healing takes place one of the great stories of knowing is again with our little girl Sage who uh we were spending the summer in our summer home and we went to visit this dermatologist and sage has had this thing called Flat warts for the last uh well since she was two and a half years old from Two and a Half until seven which is over four years she had these flat warts and not only did she have them around her face around her mouth and around her nose but they were getting worse they were moving up and they were getting up around her eyes and so on and would notice that that they were getting progressively worse even though all of the places that we had taken her had said they will go away she'll outgrow them but it didn't seem to be that way and they always said it would be a few months well years had gone by and she still hadn't so we were over my friends uh this dermatologist on uh in Kihei and he um I said Kenny as long as we're here would you mind taking a look at uh at Sage my wife was there and he took these big white light and he put it in her face and he said you've got flat warts she hates that term she never wanted to call them flat watch she calls them her bumps all right she just called them her bums so uh he said to her but the good news is that when you get married you won't have them well she's seven and a half going who is this dork you've got me talking to now and then he said to her something he said you know we can't burn them off and there's no medicine that we can give them but he did say something to the effect that the ability to rid yourself of these things is within yourself and that if you can call upon that healing capacity in you and begin to talk to these bumps in a way in which you ask them to leave that you have a much greater chance of getting rid of them faster than anything that I could give you and we certainly can't burn them off because we might Sky your pretty face and that's basically the message that he gave us I'm paraphrasing it so we went back that night to where we were staying and there was a whole bunch of kids there as there always are when uh when we're seeing all their friends were there and we walked into the bedroom and it was late at night and over in the corner in a on her air mattress was Sage and she had the blankets pulled up over her head and she had a flashlight underneath the blankets and I went over and I lifted up the blanket I said honey is everything all right she said I'm talking to my bumps and I left the room and I came into my wife or in the other bedroom I said honey you're not going to believe this but age is in there talking to her to her great the third night the same thing now that was third on Friday this happened on Monday on Friday as God is my witness on television every single one of those bumps was gone and has never reappeared since a knowing you see there is a stream of healing that is something that we can plug into it's very much like electricity people say well in ancient Greece there was no electricity there was electricity we just didn't plug into it that's all and there's a stream of healing and when we go into that stream of healing with a knowing we go to a higher level within ourselves and we don't allow any doubt in basically in every single one of us every human being out there there are two of us there's two people the first person in each person is called the ego or I call it the ego e-g-o Earth guide only all right this is the part of us that says who I am is separate from you separate from God separate from my environment and therefore I am in competition with and my value is based upon how much I get how much my stuff is worth how much better looking I might be or how much more attractive I might be how much more money I might have the value of my possessions and so on what is mine so it's not mystical awareness which says I am connected it is that individual lower level of awareness which says my ego this is mine also in each and every one of us there's another person and this other person is called what I call the sacred self or the higher self and this sacred or higher self really doesn't care how much you get it doesn't care who you're better than it doesn't care how much stuff you have it's not interested in any of that the problem is that we very seldom listen to it we pay very little attention to it this higher or sacred part of us wants only one thing it wants us to be at peace at peace whatever choice you make in every interaction you have make the choice to be at peace your sacred or higher self says whereas your ego says oh no no no it's much more important to be right and so we find people in relationships struggling struggling a lot and one of the things that they struggle about is who's right and who's wrong most of the fights that you have in your relationships really basically when you oftentimes you forget the details but it's basically about who's right and who's wrong so that if you want to have your higher or your sacred part of you ruling in your life I suggest this to you practice being kind rather than right when you have the choice and you have the choice in your relationships with your spouse and your ex-spouse with your parents with your grandparents with your in-laws with strangers on the freeway with flight attendants with Waiters with whomever you interact if you can just subdue this ego part of you which says it's important for me to be right which will introduce you to stress and anxiety and fear and so much of the stuff that I talked about earlier and instead say how can I suspend this part of me and allow the allow the part of me that wants to be at peace that wants to be happy that wants to be fulfilled and if I said to you I'm going to give you a magic wand and with this magic wand I am going to allow you to just wave it and get anything that you want whatever you want you could have this you can have this car you can have this these the nice clothes over here you can have this home whatever it is or I said to you in lieu of that I'm going to give you another one and you can waive this and for every moment for the rest of your life you'll be at peace whatever comes along you will be able to choose peace and basically we know that we're only here for a very short time and being able to choose peace which is what the sacred part of you begs you the higher self once you get that you begin to shift away and you stop telling yourself that the people who are close to me in relationship with me are the people who don't belong there I remember my wife and I we often talk about this and we we've been together a long time we've had many children together and we have a very wonderful loving relationship thank you but we'd often and one time I said to her or she said to me you know we love each other but this doesn't sound like love sometimes the way we talk to each other doesn't sound like love let's practice let's practice with each other being kind rather than being right and it was transformative that that when we had that walk that and doing that with your children and doing that with a waiter I mean a waiter who comes to you and is like you know hassled and frazzled and has been busy and all of that and your ego says wait a minute I'm here and I'm important and I have a right to be served and I have a right to be served now that's the ego part of you if this if you can suspend that and say you know you are a lucky man tonight you've got somebody who's stealing from his sacred self and I understand and you take your time and you come to me and you bring it at your convenience whenever you can I'm willing to I'm willing to suspend you know what you'll get served so fast and with such gratitude just for being kind if you practice it every single one of us are in relationship whether it's with our husbands and wives with our ex-husbands and wives with our children our grandchildren whether it's with people we drive along the freeway next to whether it's with waiters and waitresses or baggage handlers or flight attendants or people that we are in line to get into the movie we're all in relationships and we'd interact with each other all the time and probably the best lesson that I've ever learned in my life about how to be in a relationship in a way which is powerful and happy and fulfilling is to remember this sentence when you have a choice and you always do to be right or to be kind start picking kind the ego part of us wants to be right how dare you not serve me as fast as I think I deserve to be served how dare you say something to me and immediately we want to make that other person wrong and make ourselves right but there's a part of each one of us that wants to be happy he wants to be at peace and that part of us says it doesn't matter whether you're right it doesn't matter about your ego all you want is to be at peace so pick kind this kind of an attitude if we had more of this not only in our own personal lives would we improve virtually every relationship we have with all of the people closest to us and all of the strangers we interact with but on our planet as well we would begin to understand the wisdom that on a round Planet there's no choosing upsides that we're all one we're all breathing the same air we're all drinking the same water we're all being warmed by the same Sun and as they say as the Native Americans used to say no tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves it applies in your relationships and it applies as a people as well I've often said that in any relationship in which two people agree on everything one of them is unnecessary all right so it isn't about getting somebody who's just like you in fact your soulmate is the person that you have a lot of difficulty with your soul makes the person you can't get rid of that just keeps showing up you you say this they say that and there they are they're back again and they never go away they keep showing up in your life and everybody has these people these are our greatest teachers because anybody in your life who can push a button and send you into a frenzy is the person who's your greatest teacher you know why because they teach you that you haven't mastered yourself at this moment you don't know how to choose peace and of course in Miracles there's a wonderful line that says I can choose peace rather than this whatever it is I can choose peace my soul mate my wife is one of my soulmates I mean she knows how to push those buttons she's really good at it and she's one of my greatest teachers I remember saying to her one time honey do you love me for who I am or for what I've been able to do for you I just wanna she said that you call yourself a spiritual person I can't believe you would even ask a question like that she said I don't love you for what you can buy for me or what success that you've had or where you are in any bestseller list I love you for who you are and I will always love you I said well I was just asking I said what if I was just Joe six-pack you know and I was just bringing home you know a meager salary and so on she said I will always love you for who you are she said I would miss you but I would always love you she knows she's got that [Music] and all of us have soul mates my daughter Serena who's just turned 13. Martini Bopper she came home from school one day she said there's a rumor in our school she saw somebody had seen me on television that you actually wrote a book about how to raise children tell me it isn't true I said honey you can come and hear me speak would you like to come and hear me speak I said people actually pay to hear me speak she said why I mean she's she's got that all right she's just but her soulmate is her sister summer who is now almost 15. but when Serena was 12 and summer was 14 my wife was away working on a book of hers and I was taking care of everything at home while she was working on her book about a spiritual approach to childbirth and infancy care and she's as qualified as anybody to write about that I can tell you and I was making breakfast I was making waffles for them in the morning at the toaster and uh she mixes all this stuff up it's a lot easier to just put them in and summer and Serena were sitting at the back table in the kitchen and I heard summer say to Serena out of nowhere about 6 30 in the morning if you didn't have any feet would you wear shoes and I turned around I said where is this going and Serena went that's ridiculous what do you mean if I didn't have any feet would I wear shoes she said of course not summer said to her then why are you wearing that bra everybody's got a soul mate stormed out of the room there was a but it isn't the people who agree with us it isn't the people who tell us the right thing it isn't the people who always find us you know just perfectly smelling good and so on there is an element of understanding that everybody who shows up in our life has something to teach us many people have said to me that they have observed in my writing and in my teaching over the years that I have changed I've evolved if you will that when I first wrote erroneous zones and pulling your own strings and books like this that I was really talking about something much different that I'm talking about today which is spirituality higher awareness higher Consciousness and it's true because one of the great teachers again in my life was Carl Jung and in Modern Man In Search of a soul he said that there are archetypes there are stages that we go through when we reach adulthood he said those stages work like this he said it starts out with the athlete when you reach adulthood and he called it the athlete not as a put down of athletes but as the time in our adult life when our primary emphasis is on our body what it can do how strong it is how fast it can run how much it can lift how beautiful it is and so on and we believe that we are a body if you will perhaps with a soul he said the second stage is what he called the stage of the warrior and this is the time in our adult life when we take ourselves out of our physical self if you will and we take this body out into the world and we do what Warriors do which we attempt to conquer we attempt to defeat we attempt to get as much as we can it's the age of the ego it's the time when we're saying what are my quotas what's in it for me what can I get and we go through that stage and I believe that I was writing earlier in my life to teach people how to be better athletes and better Warriors because that's where I was in my life in those days and the shift has taken place for me as well Jung said that the third archetype is what he called the archetype of the of the Statesman or the states woman and this is when we finally get to a place in our adult life when we stop saying what's in it for me how much can I get how much can I accumulate and we begin to ask the question how may I serve what are your quotas and serving others becomes much more important than our own egos until ultimately we reach what he called the stage of the spirit the archetype of the spirit when we finally begin to recognize that this is not our home what it means in the Holy books when it says you are in this world but you are not of this world and these four stages represent also where we can look at our own self how am I doing going through these to what extent do I find myself consumed with my own quotas what's in it for me how much can I get and ask ourselves that question as we begin to interact and deal with other people being able to manifest being able to be attract into our lives what it is that we'd like to attract into our lives boils down to a formula that I'd like to share with you here this evening and this formula is one that everyone and that I know who was able to get things into their life practice is this I call it the four release all right so that what you really really really really want you will get and these four really stand each of them stands for something and if you look at people who are good at some people call them lucky some people call them highly spiritual whatever it might be but they are good at getting what they want in their lives and here are the four release the first one says I wish so what you really wish for everything that you'd like to get into your life starts with a wish it's a thought I wish I could get that job I wish I could get that promotion I wish I could lose weight I wish I could get rid of that addiction that I have I wish I could whatever it's a wish so what you have to start with a wish the second really stands for what you desire what you really wish and desire and the difference between what you wish for and desire is in what I call asking ask and you shall receive ask and you shall receive it's not empty words be willing to ask when I get stuck sometimes writing and I'm just not quite sure where to go or whatever I just leave the typewriter I leave the yellow pad that I'm writing and I walk over to the couch and I get into a meditation and I say I would like some help in having this become clearer as to how to express it and it's always there sometimes the phone will ring and my wife will call and she'll say did you know that this was in the mail and I said read it to me and it'll be exactly what I needed sometimes it just comes in the thing that I call an Intuition or an Insight whatever it might be the third really stands for what I intend so now you shift away from what I wish for and ask for and you frame it in such a way that you intend to create it I intend to create this whatever it might be whether it's a healing whether it's a losing of weight whether it's getting rid of an addiction whether it's creating Prosperity I intend to create it and if you notice people who are good at manifesting they don't mince those kinds of words I will do it and someone will say well what if it doesn't work out you say well then I'll just learn whatever I have to learn from it not working out but I intend to create this in my life there's an intention and the intention is so powerful that you become independent of the good opinion of other people you're not checking it out with the tribe you're not checking it out with what everybody else out there said you should do or shouldn't do you're saying to yourself I intend to create it and I often tell people don't tell anybody else about what you want to manifest don't make it a big statement instead keep it to yourself and they say why do you want to say that I say because the minute that you do you invoke ego and in quantum physics there's a simple line it says particles themselves are not responsible for their own creation another way of saying that is the way Saint Paul said it that which is seen he said hath not come from that which doth appear that is the source of everything over here it's not over here it's in this invisibleness and once you invoke ego you have to defend it you have to explain it you have to get the tribe involved in it and before long you've lost the capacity to manifest it's a spiritual Journey inspiration in spirit when you're inspired in spirit the fourth really stands for passion passion that is I am absolutely passionate about it and I intend to create it with that love one of the great books that one of my teachers sent to me from ancient India written like 3 000 years ago has a line in it that says to attempt to manifest what you want without passion is like dressing up a corpse so you take this corpse and you put a tuxedo on it and you dress it all up and you put all the makeup on it and you take it out into the world and you say now see what you can get for me but basically it's dead inside and if it's dead inside that is if it lacks passion if you lack passion you're not going to be able to attract it into your life so what you wish for ask for intend to create and have passion about you'll get you'll get it that's the good news the bad news is that what you really really really really don't want you will also get and this is one of the most difficult things for people to understand and when you're dealing with the tribe and you're dealing with what is and what what everybody else tells you is impossible and somebody might be watching this and say well that's just a lot of nonsense I mean you can't just put your attention on something think about it and have it come true it involves a whole lot of other stuff like that you see here's how it works you cannot attract thin for my hate being fat because if what you think about is what expands and what you're thinking about is hating being fat then hating being fat is what you will continue to manifest you act upon what you think about you cannot attract Prosperity from an inner Consciousness that says I hate being poor I despise being poor because if you despise being poor if you're angry about being poor then being angry about being poor or despising it is what you will continue to act upon and you'll be able to say see now that's it gets worse you cannot manifest what you want if your attention is on what is if your attention is on what is and the circumstances of your life that's where your thoughts are then you will continue to create what is into your life you've got to figure out a way to get your mental images your energy your attention your higher awareness off of what is and onto what you want and every time your thoughts are on what is you shifted to what do I want and it's even worse than that you cannot manifest what you want if your attention is on what always has been this is the way things are you'll hear people say it to you all the time these are the circumstances of life don't you understand this is reality wake up this is the way things have always been there's always been poor people you're one of them that's just the way it is and you watch that person and being poor continues to manifest into their life if you keep your attention on what always has been then what always has been is what you'll continue to manifest as you think so shall you be these aren't empty words folks this is reality and the worst and ugliest of all is this you cannot manifest what you want into your life no matter what it is if your attention is on what they want for you or what they expect for you or what they tell you are your limitations or what you can do because if your thoughts are on what they want you cannot put your attention on what you want what they want will continue to manifest and you might be in a tribe that always turns left and all you want to do is make a right turn and you go to all the tribal elders and you say look I just want to make one right turn and they say wait a minute in our tribe we only turn left we've always turned left that's the way this tribe has always been and so they will have an emergency meeting and they will convene all the elders to get you to come to your senses Jackson Browne has what I think one of the great poets on our planet great singer he has a song called for a dancer in there there are words to this effect he says just do the steps that you've been shown by everyone you've ever known until the dance becomes your very own which is what most of us are doing we're doing the steps that we've been shown by everyone we've ever known and the dance has become our very own and later on in the song he says something to the effect of into a dancer you have grown from the seeds someone else has thrown go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go home and then the kicker it always gets to me when I listen to this song he said because in the end there is one dance you'll do alone and it's like letting go of this tendency to be a dancer to be doing the steps that we've been shown by everyone we've ever known and then it becomes our own and then we pass it on and we pass it on to break that chain we have to shift our attention off of what we don't want and onto what we do want and this goes for everything I was at a doing a book tour up in Chicago I get off the airplane and a woman picks me up and she's got a doozy of a cold like you know Snoopy's as my kids call it coming out of her nose onto her dress I mean it was and I was in a in this little Honda with her for two days and she so I said to her something to the effect I can't remember what it was I I know she didn't like it but I said something to the effect of oh it's been 20 years since I've had a cold like that and she said oh that's just what I needed to hear it's people like you who go around telling us normal mortal human beings that when we have a call we should be feeling guilty she said I don't appreciate that at all she said coals are just things that happen to us I said well I understand that I said but I just don't think like you she said well what do you think I said well tell me what you think you're the one with the cold she said well I think colds are viruses and that they're in the air and they're going to land on us every once in a while and when they do we shouldn't be feeling guilty about it and feeling bad about it and people you like you writing books about it to make us feel worse I said look we're on the same page here I said I believe just like you I think that colds are in the air and that they're viruses and that they land on us she said well how come you don't get a cold in I said because when they land on me I talk to them she said you talk to viruses I said of course she said well what do you say well I say to her look you've landed on the wrong immune system I'm not going to talk about you to anyone I'm not going to complain about you I'm not going to give you any attention and you're no room to flourish on this immune system you're just not going to do your work here but there's a lady in Chicago who's waiting for you now you laugh and you think that that's silly but I'm telling you that when you keep your attention on what you don't want what you don't want is what will keep manifesting into your life addictions have been described as never getting enough of what you don't want or what you despise so we keep our attention on what we don't want and what we don't want is what we keep seeking after and then we despise it when we put our attention on what we do want when we shift to a place called unconditional love and begin to view it as something that I don't have to be dependent upon you can shift right out of it the currency for attracting what we want into our lives is our thoughts as you think so shall you be begin to place them on what it is that you want and you'll start seeing it shift over and over again and people who are terrific at getting what they want you start getting inside of their head and say what do you think like what how are you organized in here and you know what they always say I never ever allow my thoughts on anything that I don't want and no matter who out there is saying yes but you can't do this yes but you can't do that I never allow that kind of energy I don't I shift away from that energy instantly that's what separates Great masters from ordinary human awareness I have been talking during this program about a consciousness and awareness a level of functioning or living or thinking which involves something that I call spirituality it doesn't it doesn't it isn't restricted in any religious way it is a Divine intelligence an organizing intelligence that is everywhere at once some people call it God some people call it soul some call it spirit back in the times of slavery there was a young man his name was John Newton he was 23 years old and he had what is called A in Japanese it's called excuse my Japanese but it's called satari I'd love to say that satuti s-a-t-o-r-i and it means instant Awakening the idea that you can create something in your life now and Zen they have a proverb that says when the student is ready the teachers will appear so it's just being ready and so you don't have to go through this long involved process to get to Enlightenment where you get it five minutes before you die instead you can have it when you are ready the Native Americans they have a word called natohi in the elute Indians and it means great seeing like I don't see I don't see I don't see an oh there it is I see and it's like it's like in a dream when you just have this Awakening this light goes off and you just know it's an intuition if you will intuition has been described as you know if prayer is you talking to God then intuition is God talking to you it's like hearing that voice and you know it and John Newton this 23 year old sea captain had a a ship full of uh human cargo that he was bringing from the west coast of Africa to the new world as slaves and he had this Satora this Awakening and then this is a moment of Awakening he realized that what he was doing was horrible and defenseless in terms of his own inner sense of morality and he wrote down on the envelope the words to a song called he called it Grace I once was lost and now I'm found and it was Grace that taught my heart to feel it was grace that brought me home he shifted away from his material world and his his being a warrior to being a spiritual being in an instant which is available to every single one of us there have been things that have been showing up in my life and principles for me to write about and um things for me to tell you and share with you that have that have really surprised me and I've always lived by the principle of telopa the 10th Century Sufi master who said have a mind that is open to everything and attached nowhere attached to nothing and my wife and I always had this attitude in bringing up our children that keep an open mind and anything that you immediately reject get your ego out of that and just open yourself to the words of Jesus in the New Testament when he said with God all things are possible and I always ask my audience what does that leave out what is all things are possible leave out and obviously the answer is nothing in the book that I wrote um for the film The Shift there's also called the shift it has four chapters from ambition to meaning moving Our Lives away from our egos and into a place of of meaning what Serena was up here speaking about it it's a sense of feeling that you're making a difference in the world and towards the end of that book I quoted from a man named Joel Goldsmith who wrote the infinite way in parentheses and Eternity and we actually had friends on Maui a friend on Maui named Alexandra who's in her 90s and in her late 80s she would go out kayaking every day and she actually dated Joe Goldsmith back in the 1950s when he lived on Hawaii he's been a very much of a hero to me and then from his book parentheses in parentheses in eternity which is what your life is a parentheses in eternity he said these words he said then there are those who reach a stage in which they realize the futility of this constant striving and struggling for the things that perish things which after they are obtained prove to be shadows it is at this stage that some person's term from the seeking for things in the outer Realm to a seeking for them from God and that has been probably the major shift in my life taking the focus in my life off of the things the accomplishments the acquisitions the reputation ownership which we begin to identify ourselves as and to begin to recognize that Pierre tell yard the great French priest who was excommunicated from the Catholic church for his outrageous ideas in 1918. um he said you're not here as a human being having a spiritual experience that it's the other way around and you've all heard it that we are all infinite Spiritual Beings having a temporary Human Experience and beginning to live our life from this spiritual place its place of spirit where we recognize and identify ourselves not on the basis of what the ego says which is on the basis of what we have and what we accomplish what we own and what others think of us not based on our belief in our separation from each other and most egregiously not based upon our belief and our separation from God a shift if you will to an awareness of of our own divinity and from that place what is possible for all of us so I'm going to recite a poem here from a a great poet his name was Samuel Taylor Coleridge he he wrote a poem called the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and he also wrote one that wasn't that well known I put it in a book of mine years ago called real magic I started it with this and I'd like you to as I give these words I I'd like you to think about what the poet is asking and whether or not you believe in your heart or know in your heart that what I'm what the poet is saying is possible for you or whether you think it's just the fancy kind of uh fanciful uh meanderings and dreamings of a of an idealist ask yourself does this possible he said what if you slept and what if in your sleep you dreamed and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there picked a strange and wonderful flower and what if when you awoke you held that flower in your hand ah what then he concludes his poem ah what then I wonder if you think such a thing is um is really a possibility that you can go into a state in which there is no form no Beginnings no ends No Boundaries no limits and bring from that invisible place something that has substance that has boundaries that has formed that you can hold that you can smell and then ask yourself if that's a possibility I wonder how many of you think yes and how many of you think no I I'm not going to ask but um the fact is that this room has it looks like 2500 or so people in the room tonight um every single one of you are an example of what that poet just described every single one of you came from a formless place and are now formed all of you every flower that you look at began in a seed and the seed began in something that is invisible there's a little girl here tonight Camille where's Camille six years old or so seven years old I was I was swimming with her a little while ago and she showed me her teeth she said I lost two of my teeth and look there's two two teeth coming underneath it and she was all excited about that and um I said to her mom and my daughter summer who was here um just imagine that in that tiny little infinite infinitesimally small little speck that built into that was what she's going through right now what is there to do there's nothing for us to we can we can't make a change in that tiny little invisible Speck everything that you needed for this physical Journey was handed for you and you don't believe in miracles [Music] and the great Dao many of you know I lived the Dow for a year the year I turned 65 and wrote a book on it a book that I always tell people carry it with you wherever you go some call it the wisest book ever written and I lived the principles of that little book and I encourage people to to just stick it in your new purse the ones that are made out of plastic recycled water bottles is that all right and um but just carry it with you because you don't even really need to uh open it because the energy from what's in here will come to you I had a great teacher in India used to say he wrote a a a collection of his writings was called I Am That by uh Nissan he used to say to his devotees you don't have to read it just carry it with you and I heard that I was in my early 40s when I heard that and I just thought this is just another one of those crazy guys over there in India giving us advice and I just didn't think that it would be possible to get but now I've really come to an awareness that energy is in everything and that um just holding this book literally you could you could muscle test this kinesiology and put this thing next to your heart and you will be stronger with it than you were without it just try it just carry it with you let me see who would like a copy of this oh that hand right there the first hand up there you yep no next to you yeah stand up would you like to carry this with you wherever you go there you are God bless you the Dow the ching it's only a few dollars it's worth having one of the great lines in the Dow is what I'm speaking about here at these opening lines is that um it says that none of you are doing anything you're all just being done [Music] and when you look at your physical body there's a recognition that this is absolutely true you know and what can you do to change it you know things are drooping folks you can fix them up if you want to but the inevitable is there and the hair well for some of you it turns gray and for some of you it just turns it just goes somewhere else and you begin to see there's also a great line in the book because my son who's sitting in the front row Sands who graduates in a couple of weeks and it's going to start supporting me I'm so happy about that um because I often have quoted Lao 2 and he has often said the Dao God Divine mind the Dow does nothing and it leaves nothing undone it's all perfect so I say to him over the summer over in my way I said Sans come on do something you got to do it let's go we got to do something he looked up and he said I do nothing and I leave nothing undone so this stuff can come back at you it's his favorite line now Taoist philosopher so the great Saint uh Swami muktananda was asked the question what is real and his response is really worth you hearing and something for you to really think about because the strange place that I think it's weird it's just um it's just so magical but it's still it's just it's hard for us to wrap our arms around this idea that all things are possible this this awareness that um that about what is real and muktananda said that is real which never changes so what part of your physical life meets that definition [Music] we are all in these bodies that are changing every second therefore by that definition they're not real so you go back and um look at how many bodies you've been in since you showed up here you were in a body about this big that weighed somewhere between five and ten pounds and that was you and you were in a little toddler body about this tall and she certainly if someone said is that you you would have said yeah that's me and then you were in a 13-year 12 year old body which is one of these I have six daughters and they have a stance you know and they're about 13 and they go like this and their leg goes up and down and they roll the rise and look at you like you ought to try to get a life someplace you're in one of those bodies teenage body and you thought that was real that's when you get the great learnings one of my daughters Serena said to me one time when I raised my voice and ask her to hurry up and get moving come on she looked at I wonder what all those people would think of Mr positive if they could see him here this morning she turned to her sister and said would you buy a book from someone who yells at his 11 year old daughter hi hi sneak out of the room and try to best line I ever heard from any of my children ever and I follow them around with a pad of paper to give me material was for my daughter summer when she was 13 and her sister was 11. sitting at the breakfast table and all of a sudden about 6 30 in the morning and summer looked at Serena and said well if you didn't have any feet would you wear shoes Serena at that time and it hasn't gone away um could hardly stand anybody talking to her at six o'clock in the morning and so that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard you say don't even talk to me why are you why are you just don't even talk to me close your mouth why are you talking to me that's so stupid what if I didn't have any feet would I wear shoes of course not summer looks I said don't get mad at me I just wonder why you're wearing that bra that's uh so [Applause] you were in one of those bodies I was in a 20 year old body and I saw a picture of it on the PBS show and I was doing a little bit of this and the pictures of me at various stages of my life were going by and the film was uh uh the camera was looking at this picture and it stopped on a picture of me when I was about 20 years old and I'm 70 when I was 51 years ago and um there's not one cell of that body left on this planet I really thought it was real and when you were in your 20 year old body you thought it was real didn't you I mean it's just like you'd look at it of course it's real and now you look back at it and say if it was real where is it and where did it go Emily Dickinson another great poet one of my very favorite poets from Massachusetts would um would give talks back in the 19th century and she would pick up a handful of of dirt she would say just let this in 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 fulfilled their Oriental circuit then ceased like these that's who you are if you believe that you're your body just quiet us that's going to fulfill its circuit and cease and we all know that we're something much more than that but we haven't been raised to believe that so my talk tonight is really about understanding there is a component of us that is beyond the physical meta beyond the physical metaphysical Beyond form trans over past higher than form transformed and this um this part of Who We Are has infinite possibilities and can do anything can heal anything can manifest anything can attract into our lives the right people and you get a sense after a while that um that this invisibleness that is Who We Are is as you begin to elevate your awareness and move to a higher level and and this is basically the essence of it it's that we were all conceived and born into a world and a culture in which we were raised to be ordinary an ordinary isn't so bad I'm not here to put down ordinary and average and fitting in and all the things that ordinary comprises it's just not what I want for me and I got the mic tonight so an ordinary really means um it means fitting in it means getting along it means becoming a good citizen it means filling out the forms it means paying your taxes it means having your children and providing for them and taking care of them and going to work going to school and getting good grades and graduating and your family and doing all of this all of this these ordinary things and then getting to the uh later stages in your life where you become a grandparent and then you live your life through your grandchildren and then you die and and this isn't an indictment of that it's um it's for me an awareness that if I put my hands here about at my waist I am speaking about ordinary consciousness and where I would like to take you tonight where I have been taken in my life particularly in the last year or so and particularly in the last decade or so um is to a place that I call extraordinary awareness an extraordinary awareness is um it encompasses all of ordinary so that you're listening to an ordinary man I fill out the forms or I get somebody to do it for me more like it um and I pay my taxes and I've provided for all of my children the when I went to school and saw that they went to school and was there for them as much as I could be and did all of the things that we would say constitute ordinary but extraordinary doesn't doesn't stop here see this is where it stops for so many people and they go through their life with this um remember the Barbra Streisand song is that all there is the sense that that there's more there's a calling there's something in me that is transcends the physical that transcends ordinary and this something that um wants to move us to this extraordinary level out here is um is beyond the ego everything I've spoken about here is is the ego it's the striving for it's um okay it's it's an identification and a belief in my identity as a physical being and believing in what my physical self tells me is my reality and evaluating it on the basis of what I can see and touch and feel and smell and hear so that it's my senses my my sensory self is here but this up here between ordinary and extraordinary where I believe anyone can go at any time here we are what EE Cummings another favorite poet he said to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you just like everybody else means to fight the greatest battle there is to fight and never stop fighting this is how the poets think it's about going Beyond average it's about going Beyond ordinary it's about recognizing your own divinity it's about understanding that there's something inside of you that is calling you it's your spirit it's your soul and your soul your spirit is here in the distance between here and here and your soul wants something very very different than your physical body ego apparatus wants it it's really it's not interested in fitting in it doesn't care whether you're right it doesn't care whether people like you it doesn't care about whether you're a good citizen or not I wrote these words out the other night let me share them with you it says I said the ideal because I'm going to write about this the ideal of the Soul the thing that it asks for is neither knowledge nor light nor happiness the ideal of the Soul is space the ideal of the soul is immensity the one thing it needs is to be free to expand to reach out to embrace the infinite yeah the ideal of the soul is infinity it is it is miserable when it is circumscribed and restricted the soul is not finite what is finite finite means it has a beginning and it has an end doesn't it so it's that's it it stops here and it's finite the opposite of finite is infinite infinite and what is infinite what does it mean when something is infinite it means that it is always expanding right it doesn't stop anyplace it is always growing it's like the universe it's just infinite what do you think is at the end of the universe just try to imagine a finite universe and we come up with well what would be at the end of it and what we think is at the end of it is what what is there a wall yeah if there's a wall at the end of the universe the poet would ask what's on the other side and where does that end so this getting in touch with this infinite part of ourselves is really the part of us that says there was a song that was popular when my mother was a young woman it was called Don't Fence Me In I'll give Milan lots of land and the starry skies above Don't Fence Me In remember that song all the old folks singing just looking at me what is he gonna do now he's going to embarrass me we don't want to be fenced in now before I had any children I had eight theories about how to raise children I even wrote about them now we have eight children I have no theories [Music] but the one thing I know about raising children is this that nobody likes being told what to do right Sage I was telling the story of uh you honey um on Mother's Day one year at a restaurant where we're all there and my mother Marcy's mom and dad and we're all there and and um Sage is um in a lot of ways like me the the what I call the I tell the story at every talks I might as well hear it's a the scurvy elephant when I was in the foster home back in Mount Clemens when I was about six or seven years old I came home from school and Mrs scarf who ran this home had this home that a bunch of us lived and I came home and I asked her what's a scurvy elephant and she said a what and she said a scurvy elephant I mean I said and she said well where did you hear that I said well I heard Mrs Poole who was my third grade teacher talking to the principal and she said that Wayne Dyer was in her classroom and that he was a scurvy elephant so she got on the phone called the principal and the principal said oh no she said 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 I always love to say that so a scurvy elephant is and my teacher Abraham Maslow who does always say to us um you know the the number one marker of self-actualizing people is their their independence of the good opinion of other people they're just not interested in being told what to do I watched on the um on my iPad which I just got um and it um it had a commencement address by Steve Jobs at Stanford University it was a 15 minute and I just sat there and before I meditated I listened to what he had to say this immensely scurvy elephant who really I mean just passed away a few weeks ago and um you know many his biographer is now saying that he's up there with Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin and Alexander gray and Bell people like that I mean he really changed who we are as a people and how we communicate with each other and his advice to the whole graduating class at Stanford was don't live somebody else's Dharma don't listen to that inner calling and whatever it calls you to do listen to it and don't pay attention to anybody telling you what's possible or what's not possible or just fight for it Sage was at Mother's Day and I don't even remember what it was that she wanted to wear or didn't want to wear but um it had something to do with dresses and skirts and slacks and I remember that Mother's Day walking in the parking lot with sage for 45 minutes or so talking to her about I know exactly how you feel and how you think I said but there's a lot of people who think that you should maybe wear something nice it's Mother's Day and it's a restaurant I said but you don't have to go back in there we'll go home and get something afterwards if you want and uh she just give me that I don't want to do this and why should I be told what to wear and I understood that I understood it very strong and she's still doing that hmm but it also serves people very very well this idea that um I'm going to listen to that voice and we all have it and when we have this voice and this voice has passion associated with it that is when you feel a strong passion towards what it is that you want to become what you want to create the kind of person that you intend to to be when you have that within you um it doesn't make any difference whether anybody else understands it or gets along with it you don't even try to talk to anybody else about it you just listen to it and you become a disturbing element you become a scurvy elephant in the world and and it's the only way you'll ever feel fulfilled you won't get it by by fitting in so in order to you have to listen to your soul and your soul is that invisibleness and your soul is not finite therefore everything up to here is finite everything that I spoke about filling out the forms fitting in being a good citizen doing all the right things all these things which I applaud which are all fine but they only take you [Music] um you end up living a half-lived life Herman Melville I spoke about him this morning when I spoke to the writers group here I mean his writing was so profound and so beautiful and he uh he had this one line from Moby Dick which is really not the story about a man chasing a whale it's the story of um a person who has an obsession and that whale is a symbol of I must achieve it I've had a really great book this summer every one of my kids have read it it's called Unbroken by Lauren hillebrand and um I recommend that you read it and wherever this is going around the world get a copy of it it's the story of Louis Zamperini who survived on a raft across the ocean and was taken to a Japanese prisoner of war camp and on and on and on and survived Against All Odds and then at the end was able to go back and forgive I mean it's just a powerful beautiful spiritual experience and and Ahab was uh was pursuing his own inner voice that just couldn't be stilled and this is how Melville spoke because I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific Maui where I invite you to come in January to listen to the whales go on a whale watch with me and if you like what I'm speaking about here tonight we do three to two or three days on it in January here's Melville he said for as this a public ocean surrounds The Verdant land so in the soul of man lies one insular Tahiti full of peace and joy but encompassed by all of the Horrors of the half-lived life the half-lived life is the life that gets you to ordinary filling out the forms and then stopping the self-actualized life starts at ordinary and listens to its soul which you can't find but you know is there and there are some that doubt that it's there I had a friend who's a neurosurgeon over in Maui and he was saying you know you talk about this Soul Thing a lot he said I've poked around in a lot of human brains and I've never seen a soul or anything resembling a soul and I asked him I said Chuck I said um while you're in there poking around have you ever seen a thought well no of course not I said do you think there are thoughts that such a thing as a thought exists you can't see it you can't touch it again the fact is that virtually everything that exists is metaphysical beyond the physical it's very limited our physical world and it's not even real by muktananda standards because it's always changing the body that you came into this room with will be a different you'll leave in a different body there's something called you that just keeps occupying more and more and more new bodies until ultimately it just sheds it all together the great Irish poet William Butler Yates said an aged man is but a paltry thing a tattered coat upon a stick what an image unless Soul claps its hands and sings and louder sings for every tatter in its mortal dressed we're just tattered coats on a stick unless we have a soul and when we have a soul the soul says Don't Fence Me In the soul says don't tell me what to be don't tell me what I can't do don't you dare impose upon me who you are and what you think I should be that's your soul and all of you have this because this body of yours is Just an Illusion it's just a very temporary parentheses in eternity isn't it and you know that you're going to leave it and all the evidence is there and you just keep looking at it you try to pretend that it's not there and so you color the gray the color of the gray and you lift them up and you shift it around and you put on a girdle and you do all of that I don't know you do all of the stuff to pretend that it and you're not doing a damn thing in this world you're just being done you're just being done but what you're being done by is the higher self so what I would like to offer you here is a a program if you will a sort of a preview I've been reading and studying and um lecturing all over the place for the last year or two and for some reason I've been given a a big voice and a a big audience for some reason I'm I'm allowed to go on public television and and present in Prime Time three and four hour specials on the Dao de ching or on the power of intention or unchanging your life living from a spiritual place and um it must be because I have had this um wonderful opportunity handed to me that um I've been getting exposed to more and more and more but about um the miraculous power that comes to us when we start our life from ordinary and just leave that part of it to be taken care of and move into this extraordinary place this place um that all the great writers speak about where we where we transcend this ego this ego of ours that's um believes that who we are is so important and believes that who we are is what we own and who believes that what we are is in competition with others and has to defeat others and has to win and has to has to be better than I love The Poets I feel very poetic tonight a great um Indian poet named rabindranath tagore when the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 with a collection of poetry called gitanjali and in there he writes about this ego of ours he says um I went out alone on my way to my tryst but who is this me in the dark I step aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not he makes the dust rise from the earth with his Swagger he adds his loud voice to every word I utter he is my own little self my Lord he knows no shame but I the invisible me I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company that's the ego the part of us that makes the dust rise from the earth with our Swagger who's always adding his loud voice but inside there's this being that says who I am is so much more than that so much more divine and in order to get to the path of moving towards extraordinary and the fact is that um even though many people will attend to talk like this and many people will buy the books and and study it and look at it the percentage of people who are willing to leave ordinary behind is very very small honestly it's only a handful of people in this room even though the intentions are good the um the book that I'm reading now I came across a quote um I think I'm going to read it if I have it here ah here it is it was by a a French philosopher mathematician some of you studied him when you took a philosophy class his name was Renee Descartes he's the one who said I think therefore I am I don't like to question these guys I used to teach them at the University but I think he had it backwards I really believe it should be I am therefore I think well that's just my opinion I'll talk about it later and Descartes said in order to reach the truth it is necessary at some point in one's life to rid oneself of all the opinions one has ever received and to rebuild one's entire system of Knowledge from the very Foundation and I think I've done that recently just tossed out I think this diagnosis of leukemia two years ago really helped me to do that and to just say I'm starting over I'm going I'm going here and I've been doing it in some ways many of people think I've done it my whole life but honestly I haven't I've walled around in that ego a lot in my life and and so in order to do this thing you have to recognize that in a fundamentally involves changing your concept of yourself and changing your concept of yourself really means understanding what is your concept of yourself like who are you what is your concept of yourself your concept of yourself is everything that you believe to be true about yourself and what's possible for you and anyone else and it really means changing most of that because you have been raised to be ordinary you've been raised to believe in your limits and how far you can go and you've been have this imposed upon you by your well-meaning parents and grandparents and culture and religion and business and education the systems that you have been IMM immersed into have basically told you get here this is not for you and it might not have even been done and sometimes they might have even said oh you can do anything and then we'll start to tell you all of the reasons all of the exceptions to that I'm imposing on you like you gotta get dressed in a certain way for Mother's Day and you've got to fit in and you've got to do that's in you and it's like by God it's um it's like the soul has no finiteness to it it it's infinite so it means it just wants to keep expanding it wants to keep growing because you made it this far in a video I want to celebrate you most people start and don't finish most people never actually follow through most people say they want something but they don't ever do the work to actually get it but you're different you are special believe Nation you made it here all the way to the end and I love you so it's a special celebration if you put a hashtag believe down in the comments Below on this video I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome for the five lessons in life that people learn too late check the video right there next to me I think you'll love it continue to believe and I'll see you there look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job I mean you know don't sleep walk through life and don't don't say it's all going to be great you know I'll do this and I'll do that and you know I'm just marking time I'm going to be able

Channel: Evan Carmichael

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Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael, dr wayne dyer, wayne dyer, wayne dyer meditation, wayne dyer motivation, wayne dyer life advice, wayne dyer manifestation, wayne dyer law of attraction, wayne dyer lessons, wayne dyer rules, wayne dyer speech, what you think is what you become, law of attraction, wayne dyer 101 ways to transform your life, wayne dyer change your thoughts change your life, wayne dyer manifesting, dr wayne dyer greatest life advice

Id: CD99PqtFyJg

Length: 231min 57sec (13917 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022