The Resilient Mind - The Power of Forgiveness - Wayne Dyer

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Wayne Dyer was a renowned American self-help author and motivational speaker who dedicated his life to inspiring others to live their best lives. Born on May 10, 1940, in Detroit, Michigan, Dyer began his career as a high school guidance counselor before transitioning to writing and speaking full time.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 The Power of Forgiveness with Wayne Dyer. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I have a sense of that, you know, everything that happens to us happens to us for a reason. I've often said even to my kids that, you know, before I came into this world, I had a conversation with God. And God said, what would you like to do this time around in this incarnation? And I said, I get the choice?

I said, yeah. I said, well, I'd like to spend this lifetime just teaching self-reliance. And God said, you want to spend an entire lifetime teaching self-reliance? I said, yeah, that's exactly what I'd like to do. And God said, well, then we better get your little ass into an orphanage. And you're going to spend a whole decade there, and you're going to learn to rely upon yourself because there's not going to be anybody else there to do it for you. And once you have that emblazoned in your consciousness,

it's the experience of something. It's the old Chinese proverb, I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand. There is no way to understand self-reliance until you learn to rely upon yourself, particularly in those kinds of circumstances. So that experience is a very profound and important experience to have.

So that's how I look back on it. But I grew up with this rage in my heart. Dreams. My mother finally got her family back together again. She remarried my father in another body. An alcoholic. My father died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 49 as an alcoholic. My stepfather was a raging alcoholic, an angry man.

I was 10 years old when I first met my oldest brother, and our family was reunited. And it was that deep anger that I had inside of me, that I would wake up and I'd be sweating, I'd be having a fight, I'd be punching him, I'd be just like, how could you, we even made a film about this called My Greatest Teacher, which I think is here, I think it's available. And so, for some reason, my life was out of control.

I would try to find my father. I would make phone calls. I even went to his mother's, which would be my grandmother, whom I had never met, but I found out that when she passed away, and I volunteered at the age of 15 to be a pallbearer at my father's, at my grandmother's funeral, because I was finally going to meet my father, after all the searching and so on, just 15 years old.

I remember it well because I had a learner's permit, a driver's permit, and my older brother, I was allowed to drive for the first time all the way over to the other side of Detroit in order to go to this home to meet this family that I had never known or seen, knew nothing about. And I was a pallbear there, and I just kept waiting, I'm going to see my father, he's going to show up. This is going to be so fantastic.

Then he didn't show. He sent some paltry flowers from a place in West Blooming Rose, West Virginia, where he had hooked up, I think, with his sixth or seventh wife. And it was just another one of those disappointments. Then when I was 18 and 19, I went on a tour across the country looking for my father. There were different places and the clues, just so that I could have a... There was just something inside of me. My two brothers couldn't care less. It was not important to them at all, but for me, there was something that was calling me.

And finally, I gave up the search, went into the Navy, spent four years in the Navy, got out of the Navy, went to school, went all the way through to graduate school. And then in 1974, when I was 34 years of age, I was invited to go down to Mississippi to do some work for the federal government and checking out. whether the civil rights laws of the 1960s were being implemented. And after that was over, I went down to Biloxi, Mississippi, where I had heard that my father was buried. And I went to my father's grave, Melvin Lyle Dyer, 1914, 1964. He had been dead for 10 years.

I had found out about it from a cousin that I didn't even know I had. The reason I tell this story is because it was the most significant moment of my life. I went to the grave. I looked at the little marker on the ground and had his name and I really went there to do something on his grave that wasn't about love and spirituality and kindness. I truly was going to go piss on his grave. That's really one of the, that's what was directing me to go there. I was just so filled with rage for him.

there's this man. And while I was on the gravesite and just standing there, looking and talking to this man, I was hollering and I was screaming and I was full of rage. And finally, then I went back to the rental car. I had a rental car. Then I was going to fly back, I was going to drive it back to New Orleans and catch a flight back to New York City and teach in the fall semester of 1974 at Say John's University in Queens. where I was an associate professor,

and I got back into the car, and I started to drive away, and something called me back. That something is the thing that opened this rose. That something inside each and every one of us is who we really are. It's our true essence. This body of ours and our mind

and all of the things that we believe in and all of the labels that we have. All of this stuff is the ego. It's the false self. It's the part of us that really believes that who I am is what I have and what I do and what other people think of me. It's my reputation.

It's my accomplishments. It's all the things that I own. All of it is irrelevant. It's not at all who you are. Who you are is not the personal self. It's the impersonal self. And that impersonal self, that's in every single one of us, that's in every flower, that's in every orange,

that's in every living thing in this universe, it's in each and every one of us. And it is directing our lives, if we're only willing to listen. It called me back. I went back to his grave, and I stood there, and completely changed my life in two minutes.

I said, I don't even know where the words came from, honestly. I said, from this moment on, I send you love. From this moment on, I will only think loving thoughts of you. Who am I to judge you? Who am I to decide what you should have been? You did what you knew how to do, given the conditions of your life, and the conditions of his life as a young man were very horrible. I forgive you.

I never had another dream about my father, even to this day. In fact, I always feel, whenever I tell that story, and I never know I'm going to tell it, because I really believe that our desires, the things that are really pushing us to move in a certain direction, are placed there by God, or the Tao. or whatever you want to call this divine mind that's in each and every one of us. I left, got in the car, a completely changed man.

I got back up to New York on the 1st of September, and I had two weeks before the fall semester started. The 15th of September is when the fall semester started. So I had two free weeks, and I got in an airplane, and I flew down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And I checked into the spin drift motel, and I wrote a book in 14 days called Your Aronia Sounds, from cover to cover.

In fact, I wrote so fast and so furiously that one night, after writing all night, I looked all over this motel room because I had forgot to number the pages. And I had written like 70-some pages that night. It was just flying to me. And I was pulling them out and writing, this must be page 41,

and this is 42. And then I flew back to New York, and everything in my life started to shift. I was overweight at the time, I started running. I was drinking, I stopped having alcohol. I haven't had alcohol in my body for over three decades now, almost three decades. I was in a terrible relationship at the time that all shifted and changed.

It just moved on. I started being conscious of being a more loving being. Your erroneous zones became one of the biggest selling books of all time. Today there's about 100 million copies of it in print and like 47 languages around the world. And it was the turning point in my life. And it all happened in one moment of forgiveness so that when we care to carry around rage and anger and hatred and bitterness and fear and anxiety and stress inside of us through our thoughts, it's really impacting us in ways that we can't even begin to comprehend.

When you let it go, and when you shift into a place of love, into a place of divine love, which is really what I want to speak about here today, this place called divine love, Rumi said that when you are born, a ladder is placed before you. And this ladder is placed there before you, he said, in order to help you to escape from this world. And there are various rungs on this ladder. And I have lived from a different place in my life once I've understood this. I was originally trained to be a Jungian analyst, the study of Carl Jung. That's what I was doing my dissertation on.

And I changed it all when I met doctor. Abraham Maslow. But Jung had this comment. He said, from the beginning of my life, he said, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty.

It had me. had me. Does that make sense to you? I mean, let me say it to you again. From the beginning of my life, I had a sense of destiny, and this is true for every single one of us here. I have the mic, so this is what I really believe in, and I'm saying to you, I have lived from this perspective. It's what I can see clearly is all about. As though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. I wonder how many of you feel that. that there's something, that you're here for something more than just what your ego's demands are. It's called the false self.

You know, this part of us that believes that I am what I accumulate and what I accomplish and what I own and what other people think of me and I'm separate from everybody else. It's like the stuff that we've been trained on is what gets us to ordinary. We never get past extraordinary as long as we're hooked on this ego. This gave me an inner security. I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I didn't have this certainty. It had me. Now, I can't say that was true for me for my whole life, but I can say for sure it's true today as I look back and as I wrote the stories of my life. The, you know, the first book that really impacted

me in my life was read to me in the fourth grade. It was the first year I was living with my mother and my two brothers. And every day at the end of class, Mrs. Ingle would say to us, if you behave, if the class behaves, you will hear me read. I will read from this book. And the other kids didn't care so much about it.

I was so profoundly influenced by this book that was being read by Mrs. Ingalls at the end of the day that I became the enforcer in the fourth grade class. And if anybody got out of line, and it's amazing because as I started to write this, I could relive my entire fourth grade year. And I could see Fred Green sitting over here. And really, I could see Erlene

sitting over here. And I could see Dick Powell sitting over here. When they would start talking, I would get up and say, shh, quiet. And for some reason, they listened to me. And they said, why? I said, because I want to hear what she's got to say in the book. And the book was called The Secret Garden. A book that they made a musical about. They've written, you know, they've done a whole play about, but for me, it's like I would walk home from school, from Chester Arthur Elementary School up Peerless Street to my home, and I would think about a secret garden, that a secret garden is something that we have inside of us. I've written 42 books. They're all about a secret garden, about a secret place inside each and every one of us that allows us to

fulfill a destiny that is why we showed up into this world, why we went from the world of the formless into the world of form. Why we got past that ego of ours. Two years later, my stepfather, Bill, who was, you know, always drunk, and, you know, with three teenage boys now, it was a strange environment. I'll just put it that way. But he had a show that he would watch on Tuesday nights opposite the Uncle Miltie show, the Milton Burrell show. I don't know if you're old enough to remember Milton Burrow back in 1953 at the beginning of television. No, you're not. But it was the most popular show on television, but we didn't watch it at our home because he was a he was a big fan of, he was a Catholic and he was a fan of the guy who was on opposite Milton Borough.

It was named Bishop Fulton Sheen. And Bishop Fulton Sheen had a show on on every Tuesday night and I got so excited and involved in watching this show that I used to take. a yellow pad of paper and sit there and take notes and say to myself, I swear to you, this is true. I would take notes and say to myself, I could do this. I could talk on television and keep people interested. Since 1998, I've done 10 public television specials speaking just like Bishop Fulton Sheen, and we've raised a quarter of a billion dollars for public television, I'm proud to say. and it's not an accident that the show was called

Life is Worth Living You can YouTube it now And you'll see You can see different excerpts of it Because when I was writing this I went back And started watching it again and thinking I became like this 13 year old boy Sitting there taking notes

Why was I so excited about something called Life is Worth Living as a 13 year old boy Because it was part of a Dharma part of something that I came here to be. I can see it now as I look back on every one of the circumstances. And by the way, it's true for every single one of you. When Bishop Sheen won the Emmy, the first Emmy Award, was granted to Bishop Sheen opposite, the most popular show on television,

and Milton Burrow was asked, how did he feel about his competition, getting the Emmy Award? His response was so great, he said, well, he said he had better rights. You know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, said, I can't compete with them. What I did with I can see clearly now is go through these life-changing, turning events that as I look back on them now, I can see that there was something moving the pieces around in my life. You have to find, you have to listen to your excitement, that thing inside of you that said, this is what I want to do.

I have one of my daughters, she's sitting right over here, looking on her, doing something on her. She's tweeting something, yes, however that works. Her name is Tracy. She was born in the middle of the Detroit riots in 1967 on the 1st of August. And was working, gone to Michigan State, got a couple of degrees, was doing well, was an executive at a place called Best Buy. in Minneapolis, had all the benefits that you could want and everything, but this, you know, when we would talk every single day on the telephone over and over again about, you know,

she said, I'm making good money, I've got good benefits, you know, it's a, but, and it reminded me of something that happened to me in 1976 when I was driving down the Long Island Expressway, and I was on my way into the university, and I had just written your erroneous note, and I had just written your erroneous zones. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to take it across the country, and I was driving in my Volkswagen down the Long Island Expressway, and something came over me, something so overwhelming came over me that I actually had to pull over onto the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway and catch my breath, because I was just about to receive tenure. I don't know if you know what tenure is when you're a professor in a university, but everybody

fights for it and tries to get it, and most of them want it. And it was something that I was going for as well. I had written three textbooks. I was really on my way. I was just written this erroneous zones, which was just published, but nobody knew anything about it. And I was about to be granted tenure, which means that I would be working at this university in this office, teaching these same courses, for the next.

40 years of my life. And so many people were so excited because it was a very hard thing to get, but I was guaranteed that I was going to get it. And there was something inside here that just kept saying, is this what you really want? You really want to spend the next 40 years of your life doing exactly the same thing? Because I've often said, when I say I'm 74 years old, it's like, does that mean I've lived? I lived one year 74 times, or have I lived 74 years in which I am growing and listening to that inner guidance that is directing me towards extraordinaryness?

In order to go past ordinary, you have to give up the things that you've hung on to in your life that you believe to be true. And I drove into the university, I went up to Merrillack Hall, the second floor, went into to Dean Sarah Fassenmeyer's office and told her that I was going to resign, that I was giving up my professorship, which was a very cherished thing I must promise you in 1976. And I resigned. I went across the country with Tracy. She was nine years old at the time and visited every market on my own.

And Tracy, I would tell Tracy that story. Now Tracy was, this was, what, how long ago, honey? was it seven years ago? Ten years ago? Ten years ago. And I said to her, I said, what do you feel inside? She said, I feel like I'm a designer.

She said, I want to create. I feel for the planet. I don't think that we're treating our planet well. She said, I'd like to design like handbags or something, to do with this kind of work. She said, but I can't give up the benefits. It's like fast backwards.

It's 1976, the tenure, the whole thing. It's like, are you listening? Are you listening to what's calling you inside? I said, I would just let it go. And she did. She started her own company. She's here. A lot of her products are here.

It's called Urban Junkett. And she has decided that, you know, we talked about this problem with plastic in our world. You know, out on the Pacific Ocean, there's a thousand miles. It's bigger than this, longer than the state of Texas across, that is filled with nothing but plastic in the ocean. And there's another one in the Atlantic Ocean. A thousand miles across, all going down, you know, levels. and it's from all of these things here.

I usually protest these. I don't use these at home because we just fill these things up with water and then we just discard them. And we put them into landfills or they end up in the ocean. We're just not as conscious as we need to be. She said, I can take plastic water bottles

and recycle them and make beautiful purses out of them, which she has done. Not only that, but purses that that have battery bags inside of them. There's just so many things. I'm a big fan because she let go of it and really let go of... She did the exact same thing that I did

when I gave up tenure. And her purses are here. In fact, Tracy gave me this. Somebody's just written a book called Unlocking the Closet Door. Where are you, Chelsea? That's you? And she...

That's so nice. She says, Dear Wayne, A year ago, you planted the seed of inspiration in my heart from which this book was born. Now it is my gift to you. And she handed me this beautiful gift, this book that she published herself. Thank you so much. And what I'd like to do is give you a gift of one of my daughter's beautiful bags that are made of recycled plastic water bottles on the inside.

And that's for you. Enjoy it. Thank you, Tracy. Stand up. Let people see you. That's my girl. You'll see her bags here over the weekend. Now, as I wrote, I can see clearly now,

I was reading a book called To Know We Are Loved, which, by the way, is one of the most powerful things that you can ever know. It's just to know you are loved. It's truly, truly amazing. Rashad Field. He said, if we stop for a moment, it is possible to perceive a pattern in our lives

the motivators that have influenced us become much more obvious, we are able to see life unfolding from both ends at once coming into the present moment. But until we have got to a certain point of realization, this is not possible, because everything is still seen as a series of apparent causes and effects. Now, when I read that, it was before I even started, I can see clearly now.

That's part of a trilogy that Rashad Field wrote about. He's a Sufi. Let me read it again. If we stop for a moment, it's possible to perceive a pattern in our lives, which I have done, and I've seen the pattern from the time that I was listening to the Secret Garden, to listening to Bishop Fulton Sheen, to the years that I was in the Navy, to coming out of the Navy, going to work and putting myself through college on the GI Bill, going all the way through to a PhD

and all the books that I've written and so on, I look back, it's like, in the first five books that I wrote, your erroneous zones and pulling your own strings and the sky's the limit and gifts of my goodness and what do you really want for your children, there were, as I went through the indexes of these books as I was writing this,

there was one reference to the word God, spirit, higher consciousness, one time in five books. Then the next book that I wrote, you'll see it when you believe it, there were 39 references to God, Spirit, and Higher Consciousness. And then the next book I wrote, had it in the title. There's a spiritual solution to every problem, your sacred self, real magic. Now there was never a time in my life when I sat down and said, okay, now I've written

about psychology and I've written about these kind of things, now I'm going to make a shift and I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to move into a different realm in my life. It didn't happen that way. What happened is that there is, we are able to see a pattern in our lives that life unfolds from both ends at once, until we have gotten to a certain point of realization this isn't possible because we still... Everything is seen as a series of apparent causes and effects. And this is the issue. It's we have a tendency to believe that I did this and then this caused this and this cause this.

And this keeps us here at this ordinary level of consciousness. Because we're always in chronological time. When you shift out of chronological time into vertical time, eternal time, you begin to see that time is really something that doesn't even exist. It's not what we measure here on our wrist. It shifts around. It's like even when I'm up here on a stage, time. I mean, it's like, I've been talking for an hour and 15 minutes,

and that's like five minutes to me, three minutes to me. Because there's a time. How do I explain this? Horizontal time is this, this causes this causes, this causes this. But here you are, you're born. and you're going to have, you know, you have something in you called a future pull, that you're not pulling things out of the past. You're pulling things out of the future as well.

It's like the moment that you were born, your wisdom teeth are there. You can't feel them. You feel inside the gums of a brand new baby. You don't feel anything there, but they're not going to come out of the past. You're pulling those things. They're like 20 years into the future. but they're there. And this is true of everything.

There's like this future pull, and you're pulling things out of the future, you're pulling things out of the past, and then you begin to realize that there's something called eternal time where everything is happening at once. And there is no past, there is no future, it's just all one enormous now. Because everything that's ever happened to you in your entire life didn't happen in the past. It happened in the present, it happened in the now. And everything that's going to happen to you isn't going to happen to you in the future. future, it's going to happen to you in the present, in the now. And getting to that awareness,

that there is no past and that there is no future, and that everything is just, as you, as you become aware of this, it's like you can step back and you can get to a place that is called surrender. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.