The Resilient Mind - Reimagining Tomorrow: How to create a new life - Wayne Dyer

Episode Date: November 6, 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 reimagining tomorrow, how to create a new life with Wayne Dyer. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program and other exclusive episodes by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. The fact is that most of us in our culture define who we are and how well we're doing and even our very humanity on the basis of some very artificial criteria. Those criteria most of the time are considered by people in our culture to be the

ultimate. And they are things like success. How much success do I have? That is, how much money am I making, how much stuff comes into my life, how many accumulations am I able to get? And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. But as a criteria for your very humanity, it's a very low point, it's a very shallow place to determine whether or not you're living the kind of life that you're capable of living. Another one is performance, which we tend to laud in our culture and to almost worship.

I'm number one. You see it all the time. People making a contest out of life and performance being measured in terms of how far I get and what position I achieve in life or what awards I have granted to me or whatever. And the other is achievement.

How far have I gone in my profession How am I looked at by my peers and by other people in terms of my grades and my position on the ladder of success within a given corporation, things like that? These are almost like the ultimate in our culture, in the business world, in the educational world, in the entertainment world, whatever. We're always talking about success, achievement, and performance. What has happened for me and what has happened for a lot of people, particularly in some of my recent books and tapes and so on, is that after you live this life for a while and you find yourself achieving a lot of things

and performing at a very high level and being labeled a success by all of the external standards, you soon discover that there's an emptiness to that, that there's more to life than just being able to do that, That emptiness and that shallow feeling and that it's just sort of almost like a selfish pursuit, a gratifying one's ego, and proving that we can accumulate as much stuff as we can, and success isn't any longer measured in terms of how we serve others, but in terms of how much I get for myself.

And our goals become obsessions, not that we need anymore, but that we've fallen into this trap of believing that we have to accumulate more, we have to get more, we have to perform at a higher level. if we win the championship, that's great, but how about doing it two times in a row? Nobody's ever done that before. And if we do it twice in a row, well, now we've got to do it three times in a row. And now we have to do it by shutting out our opponents completely. They can never get a point.

And we are constantly looking outside of ourselves for these kinds of almost artificial ways of defining ourselves as human beings. And when you get trapped into that, you find that there's a lack of a sense of fulfillment. And what I want to talk about to make happen in this program is to have people ask the question, what would it be like to live your life as a work of art? A work of art that's in progress. That is, your life becomes a masterpiece that is unfolding in every moment of your life.

Instead of looking at it in terms of how much can I get or how far can I go, begin to see that, all right, yes, I am capable of lots and lots of wonderful things, and I have accumulated a lot of things, and I've achieved at a very high level, and I'm performing very well, but I want to take a different perspective on what my life is, and I want to begin to see my life as this fabulous work of art, that I can shape it and shade it and mold it into whatever it is that I think would be the absolute ideal for my contribution while I'm here on this planet,

for the actual unfolding of my humanity. And if you were to ask anybody, what is it that you would really like to have said about yourself? Whose life would you look at and say, this is what I would like to have been said about me? Or this is the masterpiece that I would like my life to be. Would it be about how much stuff did I get, or how big was my bank account,

or how fast did I run or how quickly did I get there or who did I beat in the process? For some it might be, and that might be very satisfying. But on a very high, a much higher level than that, the answer to that question for me is in looking at the lives of people like Christ, who was perhaps the most influential person ever to live on our planet, ever to be on our planet. Mohammed, Buddha, spiritual masters. who were leaving a message about the power of the human mind. More recently in our times, people like Gandhi,

who was able to turn around the whole fate of a nation that had been subservient to an empire, the British Empire, all through a non-violence and all through an approach to loving people and not making conflict something that has to be debilitating or destructive and to literally put them on a course of running their own lives. All through simplicity and all through a sense of, beauty and appreciation. Or Mother Teresa, who labors in the streets of Calcutta, just serving and just giving, and knows what she is for and knows that she's not against anything. You see, the irony,

there's a real irony in all of this, and I'm not here to put down, in any sense of the world, success and performance and achievement. I'm a person who has a lot of all of those things in my life. but I've found that those are the kinds of things that begin to matter less and less and they show up more and more in your life when you find yourself getting more tuned into something much beyond all of that it's like a knowingness it's like creating a sense of what I'm here for how I'm going to live this life that I have and doing it in the service of others

maintaining a sense of spirituality about yourself maintaining a sense of compassion and care and love and decency for everyone that you meet, treating conflict and difficulties that come your way, not as something for which you have to win or to master, but in fact as opportunities for you to see how you can transcend these things and not to have to use hatred and anger and bitterness

and beating somebody else down in order to get to this higher place. It's very much a place of peace, and it doesn't mean like abdicating you, like abdicating your role in life. It doesn't mean that you can no longer be an architect or that you can't be a salesman or whatever it is that you choose to do for a living. It has, it's much beyond that. It's the way that you are, not what you're getting out of the way that you are. It's that wonderful work of art that your life becomes, that you begin to see that I can make my life unfold exactly the way the universe unfolds with a real sense of perfection and harmony and

peace for myself. And the more I do that, the paradox is that all of the things that I chased after so, so hard and so diligently, show up in your life just the right amounts. It's an attitude of knowing, of surrendering, not to anyone, but surrendering from the things that most of us are pursuing all of our lives, where we get on that stress-filled, fast pace, I have to achieve, I have to perform, I have to succeed, I have to become number one, I have to beat everybody else in order to prove myself. You begin to develop an inner sense of harmony that those kinds of things are very low-level determiners of what kind of a human being you're going to be. It's like after a while when you read this and you study it and you write about it and you start to experience it for yourself,

you start to really go there, like a new kind of prayer, not a prayer that is to someone to do things and help the lions win this Sunday or whatever. It isn't that kind of a prayer at all. And you begin to experience it. And all of a sudden you start saying, you know, what these people have been saying for centuries is true. I mean, it's really true. That's the first experience I ever had with that.

It was just alarming. My sister-in-law, Marilyn, was driving on the Lodge Freeway in Detroit with her husband, my brother, and their three children. in the back seat. Now she is a hardcore linear left brain skeptic. Okay? Worse than any banker could ever be, all right? And any accountant, all right? I mean, you had to show me. Otherwise it doesn't exist for her. Medicine was her model. Anything that has to do with the mind, very skeptical. This car jumped the guardrail on the other side,

on the southbound and landed right in her face at 60 miles an hour she saw the wheels coming and land right there every bone in her face was broken her kidneys were punctured she had internal bleeding and was in intensive care for 13 weeks they took her into the hospital unconscious and no one thought that she was going to survive the night she was really in bad shape and they performed surgery on her for 14 hours and there was a team of surgeons six of them and they were talking during the surgery as you can imagine for 14 hours you would be talking my sister-in-law reported to me in 1971 when I was 31 years old and just sort of starting on this path that she watched the entire surgery she said Wayne you're the only person you're the only weird

one in the family and you're weird enough to believe this you know And it's true, I am, because when I even worked with the mental patients and doing my post-doctoral stuff, they all got together on my birthday. I mean, these were the real hard, these were people who thought they were Napoleon and were really convinced, you know. And they all got together, and they gave me a briefcase for my birthday. And I said, you know, you really shouldn't have done this. And they said, oh, we like you better than all the other doctors. I said, really?

Why? And one woman said, why? She said, you're more like one of us. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, Marilyn said to me, Wayne, she said, what happened is that I left my body. And she said, I went up to the corner of the room. I was surrounded by this light, and I was in the presence of God.

It was like a consciousness. It was like, I can't describe it because it doesn't have boundaries. It didn't have form, but it was a magnificent light. And I was there, and there was this tunnel. And I could have gone through this tunnel. And I had the choice, and it was so peaceful, and it felt so good. It was the most blissful I've ever been in my life. and she said, and I watched the surgeons performing on me,

and I watched them working on my body knowing that that wasn't me. When she came out of it after 14 hours of surgery, there were two of the surgeons, they were voting on whether they should continue this or not, or whether they should just pull the plugs. She had very little heartbeat at all, and she was so badly punctured internally, and her bleeding was so bad, and it was infection and so on. They just didn't think she would, and if she did survive, they thought it was.

So two of them were saying, let's just give up on this, you know, and go on to other people. The four doctors prevailed, who said that we really believe that we can save this person. And Marilyn then made it. She had three little children. My two nephews and one knees were in the backseat. They were just little children at the time, two, four, and five. And Marilyn decided that she could reenter, even though it was painful and didn't want to do it.

She was given, it's like given the choice. And she went back. And when she came out of it, she told the surgeons which ones had said, let's give up on it, and which ones had said, let's stay with it. And she had gave them word for word what they had said in this event. And she said it was at that time that I became really, truly aware. And she said, since then, she has gotten to meet some of what they call NDEers, near-death experiences. And that everybody who has this near-death experience, Raymond Moody writes about it,

has the same thing to report. And that is that when they come back and they do it reluctantly, they have what we call the big picture. And since then, I mean, you wouldn't believe my sister-in-law. She is the calmest, most loving, easiest going. You can't get to her. You can't get to her.

She has an inner candle flame that never flickers, though the worst goes before her. and the worst is my brother. And he goes before her all the time. And he's very linear. He's an insurance project. He's a wonderful, loving, beautiful person.

All of his stuff is motivated out of caring and concern. He wants to always, but he wants to do so damn much that it becomes like, all right, enough, I got the map. All right, yeah, but do you know which turn to me? Yeah, I know. And it's half an hour of that kind of. And she just sits there and just reads. And when there's a family squabble and people get themselves all upset,

she just picks up a book and this excuses herself. She goes over into the corner and the kids say, you know, when someone will be around, their friends, they say, what's what's your mom? And they all say, oh, she's got the big picture. It's like having the big picture. And these people, all of them report when they come back from that, they have this like near-death experience. It's like tension and stress and anxiety and fear and all of that stuff that occupy so much of our lives is just gone. It's just not a part of the consciousness any longer. My suggestion is that we don't have to have that kind of traumatic event happen to our form

to understand the universal principles and to surrender to them and to make them work every day in our life. That we don't have to go there. That we can unmuttle all of this metaphysical psychobabble jargons kind of stuff and begin to live the spiritual life. And have the understanding that we are truly spiritual beings, having a human experience and that the quality of that human experience

is only available to us through our thoughts, through our mind, through our divine connection. And that whatever your religious belief, whatever label you place on yourself, try not to think of yourself as Christian. Try to be Christ-like.

And you'll know what I'm talking about. Try not to think of yourself as Jewish, but be Jehovah-like, or Buddha-like, or Muhammad-like. These were not people who were asking anyone to deify idols and wooden deities and an orthodoxy, but instead we're talking about kindness and love and forgiveness and gentleness and spirit and that we're all connected, and you begin to live that way, and it's really quite an easy thing to do. It just depends on where you are in your path. Some people need that. Like some people who are alcoholics or drug abusers continue to drink and continue to use drugs knowing that if their life was threatened,

they would stop and knowing that they have the strength to stop at any time. But being unwilling to do it because they don't feel that the threat to their life is there. And then the threat comes. They go to the doctor, they go in for a physical, they find out that they've got a lump on their lungs, they find out that their wife is going to leave them because they're abusing drugs all the time, they're going to lose their family, and they come home one day and their family is gone,

or whatever. And that's like a near-death experience emotionally, to lose your family or to find out that you've got lung cancer or whatever. And they instantly become transformed. Now, what does it take to get? get people to get the big picture. Well, what does it take to get people to change? The answer to that is different for everybody. I can't pretend to say that I have an answer.

There are some people who need, for example, to change, they need a support group, and they need a therapist, and they need to go to a rehabilitation center, and they need to read 400 books, and they need to listen to these kinds of tapes, and they need to reinforce it over and over, and over again in their lives in order to change. And that's the way some people are wired together. And that's all fine. And if that's how your internal circuitry works, then by all means, go with it.

I, on the other hand, am not that kind of a person. I make decisions instantaneously about what my life is going to be or not going to be. When I was a young boy, I tasted coffee. I had a cup of coffee that was given to me. I was about 14 or 15 years old. I tasted it. It was bitter.

It tasted funny. It tasted like chemicals that I didn't want it. And I said to my mother and my brothers, I will never drink coffee in my life. Now, I'm 49 years old now, okay? That was many, many years ago. It was 35 years ago. And I tasted it, knew it,

and made that declaration. And I have never had a cup of coffee since then. I look at coffee, people offer it to me and everything. and I just know that I don't want that bitter taste in my mouth, and I don't want that caffeine, and I know that, all right? So that's how I am able to make change. But that doesn't mean that that's the right way, and that's the best way. And I can sit here with great confidence and say that I won't be drinking coffee,

and I'll never have a cigarette. I can say that for certain, having quit 25 years ago. And I can say for certain about a lot of things in my life, that I won't be overweight, that I will stay in shape and all of those kinds of things. For others, it's a daily struggle, and it's like it's, coming to know yourself. So the path to the big picture is different for everyone, but the understanding has to be that the big picture is there, and its availability is there. And if you need to have a near-death experience, like Maryland did,

in order to get that big picture and be able to relax in the face of conflict, be able to not allow yourself to get stressed out over small things, being able to enjoy your present moments and find fulfillment and joy in them, then have that near-death experience, but have it in your mind only. Okay? So create that experience for yourself. One of the ways to do that is through meditation. Another way to do that is just by visualizing or just imaging it for yourself. Participate in your own funeral, in your mind if you have to.

See yourself, dying of a horrible disease and suffering. Go through it. Experience it. Die while you're alive. Experience that whole thing. And as you experience that, see for yourself that this doesn't have to be brought into form.

That I can act it out in my mind like a dream, live through it, get the experience of it, and then decide, well, I don't have to bring this into my form any longer. And make then a decision not to do it. So whatever it takes for you, all I'm saying is that you don't have to go through it in the world of form, in your physical world. You can transform, go beyond your form, you can be metaphysical, go beyond the physical, experience it in your mind where there are no limits. There's no limits to your imagination. There's no limits to your thoughts.

But literally be there. And then when you come out of it, realize that, okay, that's enough. I've done that now. Let me practice the big picture. Let me see. It isn't anything that I have to really create in my life any more than that. And once you're able to do that, once you can create that for yourself, then you get all the benefits of the big picture. By the big picture, I mean you know in your heart and in your soul

that there's more to life than just what my body is going through. And you know that there's nothing worth getting yourself all bogged down about and getting all depressed about and all worked up about. You know it all. You see all of that. And everything that I'm doing to create that, like Marilyn, I'm always amazed at Marilyn how she's able to just let all of that stuff just float by her. When the kids have this particular part, when my brother gets on her about that,

or when things aren't going, how she just sort of calmly, and ever since that accident, has calmly just gone off in a corner and just sort of let it all work. itself out. It's part of the surrendering process. When we take this power of this invisible part of us, it's so hard to define this. We call it a belief, or you call it a thought, or you call it your soul, or your spirit or whatever, but that invisible part of you, that really determines everything about your life. And you begin to say to yourself, how can I apply the awareness of these thoughts and how I use my mind to make my life all that I want it to be?

to bring into my life the things that are important to me, to improve the quality of my relationships, to have the success and so on that I think that I'm entitled to. And it's really getting to the point where you know that every thought that you have has a potential for coming into your life, coming into form. You start to get real, real, real, real cautious about having anything in your mind

that isn't going to work for you. And you begin to question why you would keep any of those thoughts in you. I can remember one story of a woman who came to me one time and told me how miserable she was, that she was married to a drunk. And I said, well, what's wrong? And she said, well, he slurs his words and he repeats himself and he smells bad and it's just awful to be around him. And I said, let's see if I understand. Let's see who's crazy in this little scenario you've just described. Now, you said you've married to a drunk. And the drunk slurs his words and he repeats himself and he smells bad.

and he sounds foolish. I said, every drunk I've ever known does exactly that. We've got a drunk who's acting and doing everything that you would expect a drunk to do.

Now we got you. And you're married to someone that you call a drunk and you're expecting him to be sober. Now who's crazy? The drunk who's doing what he's supposed to? Or you who's expecting someone

who is what you've defined him to be to be something different than what they are? He is what he is. And why would you want to entertain? Why would you want to keep thoughts in your mind that are making you miserable, which is going to expand misery for you in your life by just having

those thoughts there. Why not change around those thoughts? And tell yourself that you're, like, if you argue for your misery, then the only thing you're going to get is your misery. You have to get that, and you're arguing for it all the time. You're going around talking about how miserable you are. So you want to get real careful about that. And I suggest to every one of you that whatever it is you find yourself incapable of doing. Whatever you found that has been a great obstacle, or whatever it is that's in a relationship that isn't working, that you just can't seem to transcend,

or whatever is going on with a particular employee or a way that you're approaching anything in your business, that if you examine, just for a moment, if you examine what belief is it that supports this behavior? Because the ancestor to every action is a belief, is a thought. and then work at reexamining that. I mean, I've done that so many times in my own life and things that don't seem like they're that important to other people.

My wife doesn't understand why certain things about my tennis game that I play every day that I've really challenged. I mean, I grew up with the belief that I couldn't hit a backhand. And it was for 10 years, I told myself that I don't have a backhand. I can't hit a backhand. And then I began to change that belief around. And it wasn't that I just, you know, practice, practice, practice. I began to visualize myself, doing all the things that it takes to make a backhand work for myself.

I began to do that with a serve. I began to do that with a drop shot. Instead of telling myself, I can't hit a drop shot, and then acting out on that, and a whole match will go by, and a whole year will go by, and I'll never hit a drop shot, or I'll never hit a lob, or never try a spin serve, or whatever. If you keep telling yourself that you can't do something, you act on that belief, and whether it's just a silly little thing, like improving your tennis game, which isn't so silly if you're making your living off of it or if you're coaching it

or any other skill area or anything in your life. Change around the thought as you think, so shall you be. Thank you for tuning into this episode. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.