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Have a Mind Open to Everything and Attached to Nothing  – Time 1:00

The first of these principles came from a Vedantic scholar named Tulipa. Its not exactly best seller books buts it the kind of thing that really excites me because I think of going back a thousand years, or two thousand years and reading what some of the greatest minds had to say and how open they were to the potentiality that each and everyone of us has for greatness.

This 1^st principle says as Tulipa put it, “Have a mind open to everything and attached to nothing.”

One of the central principles of my life is that, “No one knows enough to be a pessimist about anything.” Each and everyone of us when we close our minds to what is possible for us or what is possible for humanity closes off the genius that resides and lives in each and every one of us.

Having an open mind doesn’t necessarily mean finding fault with all of the things that you’ve been taught by others. It means opening yourself up to the potentiality and possibility that anything and everything is possible.

So having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing really means finding within ourselves the ability to get rid of a trait inside ourselves that I find so common in the contemporary world.

You know that most people that I meet spend their lives looking for occasions to feel offended. They are out there actually hoping they can find some reason to be offended and there’s no shortage of reasons. They’re out there everywhere.

The way this person dresses. What this person said. They turn on the T.V. there offended by this. Someone used language they didn’t like. Someone doesn’t share the same customs as you. If you keep track tomorrow you will probably find one hundred reasons that you can go around being offended.

A mind that open to everything and attached to nothing says “I’m never looking for anything to be offended by. Whatever any body has to say about anything out there my response to that is that’s and interesting point of view. I’ve never considered that before.”

I remember being interviewed for a morning television show and the woman who was interviewing me said, “How does it feel to be talking to people where audiences of people have all these strange beliefs, these weird things they come to?”

It intrigued me because one of the things that Emerson said is in one of his very first essays. He says, “The first thing that we have to say respecting new views here in New England where we are right now is that they are not new but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times.”

That was in 1842 when he was speaking about that.

When this woman asked me the question, she said that, “Doesn’t it offend you that there are people out there talking about using crystals to heal somebody?” I remember my response. My response was, “If I’ve got haemorrhoids and someone out there convinces me that crystals are going to heal them, I’m ordering crystal chairs.

All you have to do is understand the principle called the placebo. What is a placebo. Its nothing more than a convincing belief. If I hand you this pill and I say, “This pill is going to cure your arthritis,” and you take it and the pill is just a sugar pill but your arthritis disappears I’m into buying those placebos. Where can I get them.

Its true of everything. When you think about all the things we enjoy and what our life is like it took people who had a mind that wasn’t closed to make the progress that we’ve made. Progress is impossible if you always do things the way you always do things.

The other word in what Tulipa said is, “Be attached nowhere.” Attachment means I am deluding myself into a belief that if I can’t have, or can’t do this or that thing then somehow, I’m going to become immobilized.

In a recent book of mine A Spiritual Solution to Every Problem I have an observation. It’s an observation from Anthony DeMello a man I respect enormously. A priest who, In the Way to Love puts it this way.

“Here’s a great test for your relationship especially those who you are in a relationship with those you love. Not those who are your children but your spouse and your lovers and so on. So try this test on for size.

One, I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy.  And two, here’s the toughest test for non-attachment. I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are too your liking.

How’s that for a challenge? So what most of us do in our relationships and why they are not as successful as we would like them to be is that we become attached and we tell ourselves that if this person behaves in a way that I find offensive then I can’t be happy.

I make my happiness, my fulfilment dependant on those people that I love being what I think they should be. Detachment doesn’t mean being a victim it simply means I know I can make my life fulfilled and happy by having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing.

8 minutes 20 seconds

You Can’t Give Away What You Don’t Have

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The 2^nd principle is a very simple principle. It says, “You can’t give away what you don’t have.” It sounds ridiculous but its more than meets the ear. People who are not good at giving away love are not good at giving away love because they don’t have it to give away.

If I want to give you a dozen oranges I can’t give you those dozen oranges if I don’t go out and pick up a dozen oranges someplace. Otherwise it is just empty rhetoric. The same thing is true in virtually ever other area of your life.

You can’t give away love for others if you don’t have love in here to give away. If what you have in here is contempt, if what you have in here is anger, if what you have in here is fear then these are the things you are going to be giving away in your life.

There’s a law in the universe. They call it the Law of Attraction.  It works like this. You get back from the Universe, the world, what it is you put out there in the world. If you’re putting out there into the world, “I am not worthy of attracting something beautiful into my life” then the universe will respond back exactly with that message.

There were people who came to me, and came to me for years when I had my own concelling practice. They would come and say to me, “I just keep attracting the same kind of people, the same kind of events, the same kind of losers into my life.”

“Why is that?

“I keep attracting an absence of abundance.”

I suggested to them, “Has it ever occurred to you that this is the very kind of message you are sending out to the world?”

The ocean of abundance is there. You can go to that ocean of abundance and you can take a MAC truck. You can fill it up twenty times a day and take it out of there and guess what? I doesn’t impact at all.

You can go to the same ocean of abundance with an eye dropper and you can take that much out once a month and say, “That’s all that seems to be available to me.”

The interesting thing for me is that when people go to this ocean of abundance, this limited world, this “All that I have is thine” from the Holy book. If you go to this ocean of abundance and believe that you can only get so much and other people are going to get it before you do then you’ll find yourself creating that very same thing.

The even more interesting part of this ‘You can’t give away what you don’t have’ as a principle is that if your message to the universe is “Gimme, Gimme Gimme” which is a lot of people’s message to the universe.

The universe’s response to that kind of mentality is actacly the same. The universe will say right back to you, “Gimme, Gimme Gimme.” You’ll find yourself never ever arriving but always being in a state of striving.

You’ll feel your always being neglected and never feeling as if you have enough, always feeling you’re being short changed because your constantly under the pressure to give, to get back what the universe is demanding from you.

The interesting thing about this is, the irony is, if you shift that and you say to the universe, to the world, “How may I serve?” The universe’s response back to you is “How may I serve you.” When you take your energy and attention of what you are demanding from the world and instead say, “What can I give to the world?”

This is the basis behind that very line that President John Kennedy’s inaugural address, “Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” The irony of this is, and I’ve learned that in my own life, that when I stop thinking, “What’s in it for Wayne Dyer and how much can I get?” and began to shift to “How can I help you?”

People who write to me I send them something. When I meet someone who needs help of some kind I’m often just giving that to them. Then I find it just keeps coming back into my life. Once I shifted that energy off, “What can I have?” into, “What can I give?” it seemed to me that the universe responded back with the very same message, “What can I give to you?”

The most wonderful, incredible abundance has flowed into my life in every way that I can possibly think of. You can’t give away what you don’t have. So take a look at an inventory of what you do have.

How much do you love yourself? How much kindness do you have in you? How much peace do you have in you. How much joy do you have in you? If you’re able to give that away as many times in a given day watch and see how much more of that continues to show up and come back into your life.

Close 14:44

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The third principle is one of my very favourites.  It’s called “There are no justified resentments.” This is a very difficult principle for many people to get but one I believe very strongly in.

I was in a group one time of drug addicts and alcoholics and I was one of the people a sponsor and leading this group and the sign on the wall said, “There are no justified resentments in this group.”

What I said to that group that night was, “No matter what anybody says to you here, no matter what kind of anger comes directed toward you, no matter how much hate you may encounter showing up in your life there are no justified resentments.”

Meaning that if you carry around resentment inside of you about anything or anyone, and I’m talking about the person you lent money too and hasn’t paid you back. I’m talking about the person in your life that you feel was abusive in your life. I’m talking about the person who walked out on you and left you for somebody else.

I’m talking about all of these things that you have justified in your heart and in your life that you have the right to be resentful about. I’m suggesting to you that those resentments will end up harming you and creating in you a sense of despair.

I’ve often said that “No one ever dies from a snake bite. The snake bite will never kill you. You cannot be unbitten once you are bitten. It’s the venom that continues  to pour through your system, after the bite, that will end up destroying you.

Now you have to take a look at all the resentment you may have in your life and I would like to suggest to you that I think there is a wonderful metaphor for this that I have created in my life for how to make this work.

I think that Regis Philman is responsible for it. My buddy Regis. There’s a show “Who wants to be a Millionaire” that been popular all over the world. I’ve been in South Africa and it comes on. In Australia they have their own Australian version. In Greece they have the Greek edition “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?”

Basically this show has two levels that you have to get too. The 1^st level is the S1,000 level. At the S1,000 level you have to answer a question like, “On your hand you have some digits. Those digits on your hand are called, “Your feet, your nose, your ears or your fingers.”

Everyone who ever goes on this show has the horrible dread that they are going too go out on one of those questions. Basically in order to get to the $1,000 level all you have to do is answer five pretty simple questions in order too get to the $1,000 level.

Now in this program the $1,000 level of this program, using this metaphor, means that you will leave with something if you get this. At least get this. This is the $1,000 level

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You must send blame for any conditions in your life. Blame has to go. So alright.

Blame means that if you are sitting there with a disease you say without guilt “Its mine. I take responsibility.”

This means that if you have been through any tough circumstances in your life. This means that if your minimal amounts of financial security in your life. This means that if your children don’t get along with you. This means that if your neighbours are taking up a petition to get you our of the neighbourhood.

Whatever it might be that’s going on in your life, you name it, and everybody across this country, across this world has a series of these things that your willing to say, “I am here because of the choices I have made. Right now I am willing to say that.”

Even thought its difficult and we know its really not your fault, we know really that there’s a lot of people who are really bad. Your willing to say, “No blame.” That’s the 1^st level right. That’s where you understand “There’s not justified resentment.”

Then on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Show there is what is called the $32,000 level. The $32,000 level is not only an opportunity for you to walk away with a sizable amount of goodies which you can walk away with tonight from this program. It is also the door opener to multi wealth that you have to get to in order to have an opportunity to move into the transcendent level.

This $32,000 level question comes to this. It came to me from a quotation that I write in Spiritual Solutions to Every Problem. I read a book that was written a couple of thousand years ago by Patanjali – The Yoga Sutras – The Aphorisms of Patanjali

One of those aphorisms and observations that this brilliant man made almost two thousand years ago was this. He said, “If you become steadfast in your abstention from thoughts of harm directed towards others, all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in your presence.”

This translates to “Blame, pretty basic, I’m just not going to assign responsibility to other people for where I am because now, I have an opportunity to get rid of it. If I think someone else caused it then I’ve got to wait for someone else to change in order for me to get rid of it and you might wait forever for that.

But if I take responsibility for it, I can do something including move on which might be the most important thing to do. But at the higher level when there are no justified reasons for resentment what you are doing is what St. Francis did. What you are doing is you are at a place where you are sending love in response to hate.

You are literally saying, “No matter what comes my way I am going to be steadfast in my abstention from  thoughts of harm directed to others. I’m going to work hard no matter what comes my way having come out of me what I want to come out of me.”

That is love and that is a higher energy. If you can get to that level Patanjali said, “All living creatures will cease to feel enmity in your presence.”

I have a little girl, I have six precious girls and two precious sons, but I have a little girl and she is almost twelve. She loves animals like no one I have ever met in my life. Her whole life revolves around animals. When we walk in the wood’s butterflies avoid me, fly away from people around and they come and land right on her arm.

It happens all the time. She couldn’t have a thought of harm directed toward any living creature and Patanjali said to us, “All living creatures will cease to feel fear or enmity or anger in the presence of those who can send love in response to hate.

That’s what I mean when I say, “There are no justified resentments.”

What I’d like to do is share with you a story. It’s a little story a tender story that was sent to me who sends me beautiful things in the mail. I call it “The Teddy Story.” I’d like to read this to you if I can do it without tearing up.

This story illustrates as well as anything I have ever seen.

There’s a story many years ago of an elementary teacher. Her name was Mrs Thompson. As she stood in front of her 5^th grade class on the first day school she told the children a lie. Like most teachers she looked at her students and said she loved them all the same.

That was impossible because there in the front row slumped in his seat was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard.  Mrs Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he didn’t play well with the other children, that his clothes were messy, that he constantly needed a bath.

Teddy could be unpleasant. It got to the point where Mrs Thompson would actually take delight in marking his papers with a broad red pen with big X’s and putting a big F at the top of his papers.

At the school where Mrs Thompson taught, she was required to review each child’s past record and she put Teddy’s off till last. However, when she reviewed his file she was in for a surprise.  Teddy’s first grade teacher wrote, “Teddy is a bright child he has a ready laugh. He does his work neatly and has good manners. He’s a joy to be around.”

The 2^nd grade teacher wrote, “ Teddy’s an excellent student well-liked by his classmates but he’s troubled because his mother has a terminal illness a life at home must be a struggle.”

His 3^rd grade teacher wrote, “His mothers’ death has been hard on him. He tries to do his best but his father doesn’t show much interest and his home life will soon affect him if steps aren’t taken.

Teddy’s 4^th grade teacher wrote, “Teddy’s withdrawn and doesn’t’ show much interest in school, he doesn’t have many friends and sometimes he even sleeps in class.”

By now Mrs Thompson realised the problem and she was ashamed of herself. She felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas presents wrapped in beautiful ribbons and bright paper except for Teddy.

His present was clumsily wrapped in heavy brown paper that he got from the grocery bag. Mrs Thompson took pains to open it in the middle of the other presents.  Some of the children started to laugh when she found a rhinestone bracelet with some of the rhinestones missing and a bottle that was one quarter of perfume.

She stifled her children’s laughter when she claimed how pretty the bracelet was putting it on and dabbing some of the perfume on her wrist. Teddy Stoddard stayed after school that day just long enough to say, “Mrs Thompson today you smelled just like my mum used too.

After the children left, she cried for at least an hour. On the very day she quit teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and instead she began to teach children. She paid particular attention to Teddy as she worked with his mind seemed to come alive.

The more she encouraged him the faster he responded. By the end of the year Teddy had become one of the smartest children in the class and despite her lie became one of her teacher’s pets. A year later she found a note under the door from Teddy telling her that she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life.

Six years went by before she got another note from Teddy. He then wrote that he had finished High school third in his class and she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life.

Four years after that she got another letter saying that while things had been tough at times he stayed in school and stuck with it. He would soon graduate from college with the highest of honours. He assured Mrs Thompson she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life.

Four more years passed and another letter came. This time he explained that after he got his Batchelors degree he decided to go a little further. The letter explained that she was still the best and favourite teacher he ever had but now his name was a little longer.  It was signed Theodore M Stoddard MD.

The story doesn’t end there. You see there was yet another letter that spring. Teddy said he had met this girl and they were going to be married. He explained that his father had died a couple of years ago and he was wondering if Mrs Thompson might agree to sit in the place at the wedding that was usually reserved for the mother of the groom.

Of course Mrs Thompson did and guess what. She wore that bracelet. The one with the several rhinestones missing. She made sure she was wearing the perfume that Teddy remembered his mother wearing on their last Christmas together

They hugged each other and Dr Stoddard whispered in Mrs Thompsons ear, “Thank you so much for making me feel important and telling me I could make a difference.” Mrs Thompson whispered with tears in her eyes, “Teddy you have it all wrong. You are the one who taught me that I could make a difference. I didn’t know how to teach until I met you.”

Isn’t that a beautiful story?

That symbolizes “There are no justified resentments.”

Work at reaching that $32,000 level the place where the only thing you have to send is love because that’s what’s inside. That’s the message of our greatest spiritual teachers.  That’s all they ever had to give away.

Ends at 29 minutes 55 seconds

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The next principle I call “Don’t die with Your Music Still Inside You” Who better to quote than Thoreau right here in Concord when he talked about some of us hear a different drummer and we must march to the music we hear.

All of you watching, all of you here in this beautiful parish all of you have some music playing. All of you have a heroic mission. There are no accidents in this universe. We all show up here with a purpose.

There’s an intelligence that is a part of everything and everyone and all of us are connected to it. To many of us are afraid to listen to that music and march to it. You out there. I know you have a book you wanted to write. I know there’s a composition you wanted to compose. I know there’s a song you want to sing some place.

Maybe you want to raise horses out in Montana. Maybe you want to open an ice cream shop on Cape Cod. Who knows what it may be? May be you just want to travel and see the world. Maybe you want to go into a relationship with but you’ve been afraid to but your heart says it’s the right thing to do.

All of us feel something. In Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel The Death of Ivan Illich he asks this question that would be terrifying to me. He asks, as he has his accountant from Moscow, lying on his death bed contemplating the horror of this question, “What if my whole life has been wrong.”

I’ve known what my music is. Its playing right now as I stand before you with these cameras in this place and as I sit down and write my books and tell the world what I know are my truths I feel always completely on purpose and fulfilled.

At no time will I come to the end of my life and say, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”

Whoever you are, whatever that music is, however, distant it may sound, however strange, however weird others may interpret it to be don’t get to the end of your life and know that you are going to leave and not have it played yet.

Don’t die with your music still in you. It’s the message of the greatest teachers that have ever walked among us. It’s the message I give to you today as one of the principles for success and peace in your life.

Ends at 32minutes 40 secs

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The next principle I call “Embracing Silence. Embracing silence, not that I say this to you because it is so important to be quiet. What I have learned, I have a dear friend, and many of you know we’ve appeared in tapes together, appeared on stage together, he teaches all over the world. He’s like a brother to me.

His name is Dr Deepak Chopra. A medical doctor and a dear and close friend. Whenever anything is going on in my family, if I’m having a problem with one of my children or in my own life. If I call him up and say, “Deepak or his wife Rita, I’ll say Deepak what do you think I should do?” He always has the same answer. “Meditate.”

“Yes I’ll say, Deepak I understand meditate but Deepak what do you think.” He’ll say, “Wayne go deep inside and meditate.” I’ll say, “Will you put Rita on.”

You know I’ve learned a lot in meditation. What I know most about getting quiet, getting peaceful is this. There is only one power in the Universe and it doesn’t matter what you call it. You can call it soul Spirit, consciousness or God. You can call it Louise. You can call it anything you want.

As Alan Watts said, “You can’t get wet from the word water.” It’s not what we call something that gives it its substance. This one power, this one force that flows through everything and allows everything to be is indivisible.

You can’t cut it in half. You can’t divide it. It’s the One. It’s KNOWING the One. Everything in your life is almost always given a division. Male-Female. Young-Old. Tall-Short. Black White. Good-Bad. Up-Down. These are all dichotomies. These are all splits we all have in our lives. The whole physical world that we live in and are immersed in is always immersed in this division.

I used to teach a course at St. John’s University in New York and I used to tell my students when I was trying to teach this principle, “Anyone who can come to class and bring with them a magnet that only has a North Pole I’ll give you an A in the course and you don’t ever have to attend another class.

No matter how thin they would slice that magnet there was always the South Pole because the physical world is made up of dichotomies. We have to learn to fuse the dichotomies. In fusing the dichotomies and blending the One is what silence does for us.

That’s why embracing silence is so powerful because no matter how many times you cut silence in half its like zero. You still only get silence. In Zen they say, “It’s the space between the bars that holds the tigers.”

It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music. These words that come out of my mouth right now come out of the silence and finding that silence and embracing it means that you go to the place within you that you cannot divide.

Just like you cannot divide the Source, the One, the Spirit you can’t divide that either. Its only One. So when you go into your silence and you begin to practice meditation, and you begin to make this part of your life and embrace the silence what you’ll come to discover is that this is where you come to KNOW your Source.

You’ll make conscious contact with your Source. I can’t tell you how many people have come to me and suffered from serious illness and have been given diagnosis that its terminal and who have gone out to the wilderness and decided I am going to commune with nature.

The transcendentalists Thoreau and Emmerson believed that nature was our Source and believed that if you could get back to your Source, that if you can get back with that feeling of being One with Spirit then that’s were healing can take place.

I’ve had wonderful stories of people who told me when I began to embrace that silence that I began to feel more connected to my Source. Embrace silence because it’s a way to come to know God, to know your Source.

Both are indivisible. The only experience that you can have in your daily life that even comes close to a spiritual awakening is silence.

Ends 37:41

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The next principle I call, “Giving up your personal history.” I learned if from a man called Carlos Castaneda who once said, “One day I finally realised that I no longer needed a personal history.”

“Just like drinking, he said, “I gave it up and that and only that has made all the difference in the world.” You know the nice thing about giving up your personal history is that if you don’t have a story you don’t have to live up to it.

All of us have these bags of manure that we carry around with us that we call our past and the people who have done things to us and the events and the circumstances and all of this stuff that we use and we bond to.

We bond ourselves to these wounds of our past and we identify ourselves on the basis of these wounds and every once in a while, we set it done and we reach in there and we smear it all over ourselves and then we wonder why does my life smell so bad. I don’t understand that.

When in fact, the NOW, this moment, merging yourself into this moment means that……. You may have been in a relationship. I had a woman from Holland who came over to see me whose husband had left her after twenty-five years. She had four children and she just had been on the verge of suicide.

She was loosing weight. She was depressed. She was taking all kind of drugs for it and she was getting sicker and sicker because she just couldn’t get over it. She came to a book signing I was doing at a bookstore down in Florida and she said, “You’ve got to say something to me that will help me get over this.”

I told her this line, “Give up your personal history. Merge yourself now into this moment and if you want to know how to do it think of your past as this hat” This is your past. Now you just can’t set this thing down over here and walk away from it and give up your personal history because you’ll always have it there to look back at.

What you do is that you pick up your past and you embrace it, you understand it, you accept it as I had to go through these things I had to go through in order for me to get to this place today and the evidence for that is that I did.

You don’t need any more evidence. Then you toss it. You embrace it and you toss it. You merge into the NOW by giving up your attachments. Some of you have heard me use the metaphor of the wake. The wake is not what drives the boat. The wake is just a trail that is left behind. That’s all it is.

So is the wake of your life. The wake doesn’t make the boat go and neither is the wake of your life the reason why your life is going in the direction that it is. The wake is a trail that is left behind and its an illusion to believe that it’s the cause of your suffering or your struggles or your difficulties.

Give it up. Let it go. Embrace it, understand it, get help if you need to do that if you must and then move into the NOW.