On June 26, 2012, Dr. Wayne Dyer announced to his children that he was no longer going to write books. He said he was done with that part of his life, and was ready to move into a new phase. But on June 27, 2012, he woke up and started writing. And found he couldn’t stop even if he tried. The result is his newest book, “I Can See Clearly Now.”
“On the 27th of June, I woke up and I started writing, and I wrote for like five months in a row, every single day, morning, noon and night. I just couldn’t bring myself to stop writing,” he said on a media conference call in December 2013. “It gave this indication that there’s something bigger moving the checkers around in this checkerboard called life. That there’s something bigger than that, and I got into a zone.”
His newest book is an autobiography of sorts, where he reveals how while we are all making choices every day, there is also a force greater than us operating in our lives. He uses the turning points in his own life to illustrate this teaching.
“It seems to me, as I look back on my life, that thing that’s called eternal time, which is where everything is already handled at once, is operating at the same time as what’s called chromos time, or chronological time, or cause and effect time,” he explained on the call. “That my life, your life, everyone’s life, isn’t just a series of causes and effects that come out of the past. We’re also pulling things out of the future.”
One of the choices we can make is how we learn and grow, or come to a place of enlightenment. This can be done through suffering, through being in the moment, or through aligning with our intuition, said Dyer, explaining how there were many times in his life where he came to enlightenment through suffering.
Once example is spending 10 or 15 years of his life drinking beer every single day, not eating right and not feeling very good.
“I also got to a point where I realized this was just not something that was good. So that’s enlightenment through suffering, and this is true in so many of the things in our lives. All of our different relationships that worked and then didn’t work, all of our financial problems that we encountered, health problems, and so on, that you go through … and then all of a sudden you realize I’ve got to change the way I eat. I’ve got to change the way I exercise. I’ve got to do something about that,” he said.
The second way of enlightenment, or self-actualization, is enlightenment through being in the present moment, so when these things are happening to us — a breakup of a relationship, a fire that burned down our home, the death of someone close to us — we can make the choice not to suffer.
“Instead of saying, ‘Now I’m going to go through this long period of time in which I’m going to suffer, I’m going to be incapacitated as a result of this,’ you shift to being in the moment and saying, ‘What’s in it for me? What’s the lesson here right now? What can I get out of it?’” he noted.
There is also a third stage of enlightenment, where our intuition takes over, and we can see things coming our way before they arrive — where we are in a “collaboration with fate,” and realize, if we put our awareness on something, we can prevent it from happening in our life in an “incapacitating way.”
“You can make your choice on all of this,” said Dr. Dyer. “You can go through this lifetime of suffering, or you can get back to where you’re in a state of gratitude for everything that’s taking place in the moment, and deflect it away, or you can become anticipatory. And this is the exciting time. This is when miracles take place.”
A CLEAR VIEW
While we all have choices and free will in our lives, there is still a universal force working on our behalf to create opportunities and events we need in order to grow. Looking back on his life, Dyer can see the factors that took place in order to lead him where he is now. For example, living in an orphanage taught him to be self reliant, something he has dedicated his life to teaching others.
“I didn’t just choose to have the father that I have, and have him abandon our family and have him just walk out on us and make a choice to go into an orphanage, but there was something moving the pieces around that said, ‘If you are going to teach, you are going to sign up for a whole lifetime of self-reliance, and you better learn how to rely upon yourself as a young boy, and you better learn how to serve others,’” he explained.
Another example of a force behind his conscious choice was growing up with an alcoholic stepfather who watched Bishop Fulton Sheen on “Life isWorth Living,” rather than “The Milton Berle Show,” which was popular at that time. With only one television set in the house, this is what everyone watched.
“I still remember watching Bishop Fulton Sheen as a young boy and being engrossed in something called ‘Life is Worth Living,’ and I think, ‘Was I making that choice? How did that alcoholic man come into my life for those four or five years, and how did it turn me around?’” he said.
“Out of the 40 books that I have written, the subtitle of every one of them could be called ‘Life is Worth Living.’ It was a hugely impactful thing for me. I look back and I think, ‘Was I making choices?’ Yes, I was. I was making choices. I could have just gone off into my room or sulked or left or whatever, but I sat there and watched and took notes.”
His new book, “I Can See Clearly Now,” is about looking at the choices we make, as well as the factors taking place beyond our control, and realizing if we look at life happening now, we can begin noticing these things as they happen.
One of the most significant turning points in his life was when he visited his father’s grave in 1974 after being angry with him for many years. He sat at the grave, cursing at him for several hours, and then he said, “I forgive you. From this moment on, I send you love.” At that moment, something shifted inside of him.
“I don’t know what it was or how it happened to get there — all of the coincidences that coalesced in order for me to arrive at that place in Biloxi, Miss., on the 30th of August, 1974 — but all I know is that I just left this gravesite feeling completely different,” Dyer said. “I had just sent him love from that moment on and said, ‘Who am I to judge you? You did what you knew how to do given the conditions of your life and how can I ask you to be anything other than what you are?’ I just let go of it, and I went back and I wrote ‘Your Erroneous Tones’ in 14 days down in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.”
Thinking about his father and the impact he had on his life, he knows he will understand much more when he leaves his current body, but understands there was meaning behind it all.
“Perhaps he incarnated into this world in order for his younger son to figure out how to forgive so that he could impact millions of people. Who am I to question any of it? That is probably the most significant moment in my life and in that book as well,” Dyer explained.