The Resilient Mind - Recognizing The Power Within You - Wayne Dyer

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

Wayne Dyer was an internationally renowned author and speaker in the fields of self-development and spiritual growth. Over the four decades of his career, he wrote more than 40 books, including 21 New York Times bestsellers. He created many audio and video programs, and appeared on thousands of television and radio shows.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to, recognizing the power within you, with Wayne Dyer. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. I will be speaking this evening about something that's very dear to my heart. It's not really a canned speech. It's not something that I've memorized. I don't speak from notes, I speak from my heart, about something that I work on each and every day in my own life.

It is about a process that has been a growth thing for me. The idea of there being levels of awareness, ordinary human awareness, and higher levels of awareness are something that you can do a lot of reading about and you can study spiritual literature. but until you begin to put it into practice and live it each and every day, it really just is something that is distant and more academic. What I will be attempting to do here this evening is to share with you some very specific principles that I have studied and practiced with my family, with my wife particularly and our children and my extended family. I am not here to proselytize for any particular point of view. I don't represent any religion.

I'm not organizing anybody or encouraging anybody to join anything. I have never been a joiner. I don't pay any memberships any place. I really don't think of myself as a very organized person, period. I think a truth is a truth very often. until you organize it. And then it becomes a lie very often, because the organization becomes more important

than the truth that we're attempting to teach. So this is not really about getting people to agree with me. When I was back in school, I had professors who used to say, if you want to understand poetry, or if you want to understand a great novel, or if you want to understand a great movie or enjoy it, what you have to do is practice what he called willingly suspending your disbelief.

So that when you go into a movie theater, for example, you will see a two-dimensional screen. And you don't walk in and say, well, that's just a two-dimensional screen with a lot of images that are being projected from the rear of the room from a projector. And I'm not going to allow my emotions to be impacted or affected by a silly little thing like a projector. If you did that, you would not be able to enjoy the movie. What you do is you willingly suspend your disbelief. You just let go of any of your doubts. And you just allow yourself to be entertained for a couple of hours.

And you say, like, all right, Nicholas Cage can exchange faces with another man. All right? That's a possibility. I'll buy it. And they can go home and... convince their wives, even though they've just exchanged faces and nothing more, which was always a surprise to me, that this thing's really happening. But what I'd suggest to you is that if you argued with that and said, oh, this is ridiculous or this is just not impossible, that you wouldn't be able to enjoy the movie.

And I suggest that you take what I'm speaking about here this evening, some of it will conflict with some of the things that you have been conditioned to believe in, some of the things that you may hold very dear to your heart. And I'm not here to challenge them. I'm not here to get you to change your point of view. I'm not here to get you to join some organization that I think will get you to be more enlightened. I'm just offering you what comes from my heart principles that are involved in being able to reach higher and higher and higher levels of awareness. So that things like miracles and being able to attain. into your life what has been missing up until now, the ability to heal yourself of perhaps

diseases or processes of difficulty that you've never been able to handle before, the capacity to be able to create the kind of relationship that you would like to have, the ability to even get a job that perhaps you haven't been able to get or to raise your level of prosperity, whatever it might be, to sell your home, if you've been having difficulty doing that. That 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 perceived to be 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 Buddhist 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 it? 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 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, what is 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 everyone 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 a hundred, 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 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, 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 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 all of the things that happened to me in my past are what are keeping me from doing what like to do today. So we hang on to these things and we fill ourselves with blame. He say, I'm the middle child. I'm the youngest child. I'm the oldest child. 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 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. 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 comes from a story that I heard Alan Watts tell one time. And it was a very powerful story. He said, your life is like a boat.

And it's heading up the river at, say, 40 knots. 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 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, can a 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 that every one of us has a wake. 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 you can take a look at the experiences of your life.

I look at the experiences of my life. In the experiences of my life, I spent some years in a series of foster homes. People have said to me, oh, 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. And when you're 40 and your life isn't working and you're bankrupt and you're a drug addict and your relationships are all falling apart and your family's leaving you and you say, why is this happening to you? You say, 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 too. And so it's like we take a look at all of these things in our way. 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 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.

Who's sitting right here. 107 years old. No, you're not 100. 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 make a family again with all the hardships. This was a man who never made a phone call, who never sent a penny, who spent some time in prison, who was an alcoholic, who died of cirrhosis of the liver at 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 I 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, 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, the 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, getting 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, close 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 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. You say, what happened? Well, 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 name, 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 Nisar Gadata Maharaj. I 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? 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

there's a little girl sitting right in the front row. that's dumb. She said, that's what's inside. It has to come out. I said, well, that's the answer. You are really smart. And she smiled. She thought that was great.

But that's the truth. The reason that orange juice comes out when you squeezes 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 immediate, 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. That'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 jam or when I'm on the freeway and I'm trying to get someplace, that 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 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 beans 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 us. 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 Costaneda.

And Costaneda talked about his teacher who was what they call inaugural, and a Native American term that refers to all that is knowable. And his teacher told him that your life is like being born into 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 though there's 99 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 altogether 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 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 goes 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 blub 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. 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

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 to the difference between what you know and what you believe in. Immerse yourself 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. She 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 blacken 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 some nerve, 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 despair, 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. 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 place my keys right here in a certain spot. But my little girl has this wonderful habit of taking my keys and hiding them on 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 did you put my keys? The last time they were in your dollhouse, where did you put it? 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 so i give up i say 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 then i'd before in my pocket. And there's a fine line, I think, between being a guru and being a jerk. 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, along with my wife, a couple of years ago, with a man on Maui, whose name is Michael Kanaf, who had been injured in the same.

in an accident. He's a quadriplegic or paraplegic. And at that meeting, when it was over, there was 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 out? 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 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 we were spending the summer in our summer home, and we went to visit this Dermin, dermatologist. And Sage has had this thing called flatworts for the last, 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 flatworts. 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 I would notice 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 at my friends, this dermatologist in Kihei, and he, I said, Kenny, as long as we're here, would you mind taking a look 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 flatworks. She hates that term. She never wanted to call them Flatwater. She calls them her bumps. All right? She just called them her bumps. So 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's 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 scar 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 we're saying all their friends were there And we walked into the bedroom, and it was late at night, and over in the corner 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, shh, I'm talking to my bumps. And I left the woman. I came into my wife in the other bedroom, and I said, honey, you're not going to believe this. But Sage is in there talking to her bumps. Isn't that great? The next night we did the same thing. That was the second night.

The third night, the same thing. Now that was third night. 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. 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'm 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 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 get 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 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 can have this, you can have this car, you can have this 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 wave this,

and for every moment for the rest of your life, you'll be at peace. Whatever comes along, you'll 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'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 with each other, being kind rather than being right.

And it was transformative when we had that walk. 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 you can suspend that and say, you know, you are a lucky man tonight.

You've got somebody who's dealing 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 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 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'm. 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, 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. 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 soulmate's the person you can't get rid of. They just keep showing up. 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 is a wonderful line that says, I can choose peace rather than this. Whatever it is, I can choose peace. I can choose peace. My soulmate, 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 wanted, she said, 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 on 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 Sixpack? You know, and I was just bringing home, you know, a meager salary and someone. 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. And all of us have soulmates. My daughter, Serena, who's just turned 13, my teeny 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 she's she's got that all right 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 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. And Summer said to her, then why are you wearing that bra?

Everybody's got a soulmate. Stormed out of the room. 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 men 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 us, 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 statesman or the stateswoman. 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 that I know who is able to get things into their life practices this. I call it the four reallys.

All right? So that what you really, really, really, really, want, you will get. And these four really, 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 realies. 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. It's a

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 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 just not quite sure where to go or whatever, I just leave the typewriter, I leave the yellow pad that I'm writing on. 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'll say, 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 says, 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 St. 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 three thousand 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 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 from 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 shift it 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. These are 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 of the elders to get you to come to your senses Jackson Brown has 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 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, Snoopies, as my kids call it, coming out of her nose, onto her drive. I mean, it was, and I was 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 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 cold, we should be feeling guilty. She said, I don't appreciate that at all. She said, colds 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 like you are 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 that?

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 it, 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 have 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. 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 thought. 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? 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,

is, 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. Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you're enjoying the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.