| Spiritual Solutions to Every Problem The Edge Interview with Dr. Wayne Dyer by Phil Bolsta Last of a two-part series Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, the well-known author of Your Erroneous Zones, Meditations for Manifesting, Staying on the Path, Your Sacred Self, Everyday Wisdom and You'll See It When You Believe It, will return to the Twin Cities for a motivational seminar from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, April 20, at Washburn High School, 50th and Nicollet, Minneapolis. He spoke with The EDGE last month about the nature of his newest book and upcoming talk, entitled There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. This month, he continues his dialogue with us on his greatest personal challenges in life and forgiveness. "Forgiveness is the essence of virtually every civilized religion in the world," Dr. Dyer says. "It's the message of every great spiritual master who's ever walked on this planet, including Jesus: 'Forgive them for they know not what they do.' "I always liked Mark Twain's observation about forgiveness: 'Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.' Again, it goes back to that prayer of St. Francis, and it goes back to there being a spiritual solution to every problem: 'Where there is hatred, let me sow love.' When you bring love to the presence of hatred, no matter what, at any moment, hatred cannot survive. And hatred is one of the causes of most of the emotional problems that people face." Forgiveness is a tall order for a lot of people. Isn't "release" perhaps a better way to put it? Dr. Wayne Dyer: Well, whatever term you want to use to describe "letting go" and no longer hanging on, to detaching from all of the things you believe should have happened or shouldn't have happened. For example, my father walked out on me when I was an infant. He never made a phone call, never looked back. He spent years in prison and died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was basically a very abusive man in almost every way -- and certainly irresponsible. I look upon his role in my life as one of the most important; it wasn't until I was able to get rid of my anger and hatred toward him and forgive him that I was able to get off of a path of self-destruction. How do you choose love over fear? Is it as simple as just making a choice? Dyer: You just fake it until you make it. There's a book by Susan Jeffers called, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Don't think that people who have courage don't have any fears. It's just that people who have courage face their fears. That's the difference. That's what courage really is. You look fear right in the face and you walk right into it. You don't run away from it and you don't blame it on somebody else. True nobility isn't about being better than anybody else. It's just about being better than you used to be. It's about challenging something you used to give in to and not telling yourself that, until I get rid of all my fears will I be a self-actualized person. You'll never get rid of the fears, but you can come to a place where you're willing to face them. What else will you be addressing in your April seminar here? Dyer: Well, there are two things. I had an PBS special that aired in March. It was recorded out in Concord, Mass., at the parish where Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather was the minister. We recorded it on the Old North Bridge, which is where the American Revolution began with the "shot heard 'round the world." We recorded a show there called, "There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem" and another one called, "Ten Secrets for Success and Inner Peace," both of which are also books that are now out. The April seminar will be basically an expanded version of those two shows. Can you talk about shifting from a belief system to a knowing and how that relates to healing? Dyer: Yes, a belief is generally something that comes to us from outside of ourselves. It's the culture we're immersed in. It's the people who raised us. It's the books that we've read. It's all of the forces that have been impinging upon us in order to get us to change or to be what they think we should be. Whereas, a knowing is something that comes from within. For example, knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience. There's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. Knowing about God is all of the stuff we've been told and all of the books we've read and all of our religious experiences and what others have told us and tried to convince us of. But knowing God is when we make conscious contact. And that's why making conscious contact is such an important part of the healing process. In the world of healing, when a knowing confronts a belief in a disease process, the knowing will always triumph. It takes an abandonment of tribal consciousness to get to a place where you can say, "I know I can heal myself." It's a banishment of all doubt. What's the first step somebody can take to get to that place? Dyer: The first step is to turn your life and your problem over to making conscious contact with God. Turning it over to God, saying, "I am connected to God and I am going to turn this thing over, because I don't know how to deal with it myself." And then to get quiet and peaceful and meditate. Meditation isn't just something we do to make ourselves more peaceful and to take some of the stress out of our lives. We do it because it's the only direct experience we can have of knowing God. Because God is that which is indivisible. Everything else in the universe, in the physical world, is divisible. Up and down, good and bad, right and wrong, male and female, and so on. But that which is indivisible in our physical experience is called silence. And when you get into silence, you're coming to know the indivisibleness of your life -- and that's conscious contact. That's the first step and the major step we need to take. Is that what you refer to as Siddhi consciousness or unity consciousness? Dyer: Yes, when you finally make that conscious contact and you know that you and God are one. I am in you and you are in me. I am in the father and the father is in me. There's no separation there. The Course in Miracles says that if you do have a problem, you only have one. And that one problem you have is the belief that you are separate from God. Is unity consciousness more easily adopted by very young people? Dyer: No, I don't think it has anything to do with age. I think some people show up here with very high levels of consciousness, some of us struggle for it for our whole lifetime, and some never get past shame and guilt and so on. Although younger people who haven't been conditioned have more of a sense of their own ability to perform miracles. For example, in the book I tell the story about my daughter, Sage, who had a series of flat warts on her face for almost four years. She was seven at the time. A dermatologist told her the best way he knew for getting rid of them was to talk to them, because he didn't want to burn them off or do anything that would disfigure her. So she talked to her "bumps," as she called them, for three nights in a row and they disappeared and never returned. Her skin has been perfect ever since. You grew up in an orphanage and foster homes. How did that shape you in terms of bringing you to where you are now? Dyer: Well, I think we have to go through everything we go through in our life, and I believe my purpose in life was to teach self-reliance. So I had the experience of relying on myself very early in life in order to have that knowing, because otherwise I would've just read about it. I think of it now as a great advantage that I had. It certainly taught me to rely upon myself at a very young age. And that's what I've been teaching since I was a little boy. Was that the greatest challenge you ever had in your life? Dyer: No, it really wasn't that much of a challenge. When you're an orphan, you don't wake up every day and tell yourself, "I'm an orphan again today. Why did this happen to me?" You just get on with your life. I've had other challenges that were much greater than that. What has been your greatest challenge? Dyer: Well, I've had a number of addictions in my life I've had to overcome. I have sort of an addictive personality. I played around with alcohol and drugs and caffeine. I drank beer a lot and was overweight for a while. I've also been through the challenge of divorce. That was a very powerful challenge in my life. What steps allowed you to overcome the addictions and divorce? Dyer: Getting closer to God. Feeling that my challenges were not between me and my addictions or between me and my ex-wife, that they were really between me and God. The question was, can I bring love and peace to the presence of those challenges and not get down on myself or someone else? And I was able to do that. I also had a heart attack a year and a half ago, which I wrote about in my new book. That was another great challenge. Spirituality, of course, is a gradual, lifetime process. Do you remember how old you were when you finally started to "get it" and started to awaken? Dyer: I think it's an evolutionary thing. Perhaps it was when I started writing a book called, You'll See It When You Believe It, which represented a major shift away from psychology and towards spirituality in my writing. But as I look back on my earlier writings, with books like Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings, there's a lot of spirituality in them. I just didn't call it that. I've always had a knowing that being kind is a lot more effective than being angry. And being generous has always been a characteristic I've had; whatever I've had, I've always been willing to give away. Those are spiritual qualities. So there was never one moment in your life when the bell went off? Dyer: No, it was an evolutionary process, although a very key moment in my life was when I went to my father's grave and was able to forgive him. Another key moment happened in a meditation when I had an inner experience of knowing God. Another time when I was giving up drinking. I had a real clear sense in my mind that this wasn't something I was going to continue to do any longer. I had a feeling of a presence. I was in a dream almost, and I was looking through a window that someone had put special Windex on so I could see right through it for thousands of miles. All I could see was pure infinity and pure love and that it would be easy, not hard. And it was. One last question: how can we look at the terrorist attacks on New York City and the situation in Afghanistan and find a spiritual solution to help us resolve this problem? Dyer: We have to recognize what the problem is. If you go back to 1775, everybody in America was told to hate the English. Thirty years later, we were allies with the British and we hated the French. Fifty years later, everybody in the South hated everybody in the North and everybody in the North hated everybody in the South. Forty years after that we were at war with Spain and now everyone in America bitterly hated the Spanish. And 20 years later, we hated the Germans, and 25 years later we hated the Japanese and then we hated the Russians for a very long time. And then the Iranians, the Iraqis and now it's the Taliban. The faces of who we're supposed to hate just keep changing. See, the problem isn't who we hate. The problem is hatred itself. All of this stuff passes, but hatred is the lowest, slowest energy that human beings can live under. And when we have too much of it in the world, we begin to see that it becomes very, very, very destructive and then we react. The problem with using force in our lives is that we always create a counterforce. For example, if you're with a child and the child says, "I hate you," which is a very low energy, and you respond with, "I hate you too," you have lowered the collective energy that you are both in, and both of you will be weakened. Whereas, if you respond to, "I hate you," with love, which is what, instinctively, we know what to do, then we can dissolve and dissipate that hatred. Until we collectively learn how to respond to each other's hatreds with love -- which is what Jesus taught us, which is what Buddha came here to teach us, which is what Muhammad taught us, which is what all of the great spiritual masters who have ever walked among us who live at those highest energies taught us -- responding to force with more force will just create more problems. Ultimately, I think that is what we will learn. In the meantime, we have to look at the people who want to tear our buildings down as a cancer in a body called humanity and we have to isolate and remove those cancer cells. One of the new ways they're learning to deal with cancer is that they surround the adjacent cells with high doses of very high energy through lasers and so on, and just the presence of that higher energy around those cancer cells has a tendency to dissolve it. It might be the cure for cancer we've been hoping for for so long. And that's what we have to do: We have to isolate and remove those that would behave in these ways. But we also have to ask ourselves why we attract so much hatred in our world. Why does America attract so much hatred and how much of that are we putting out into the world? How much are we exporting violence? How many guns do we produce? How many nuclear weapons do we produce? What do we do with all of our wealth, and so on? Why aren't we better at exporting what good people we are rather than how different we are and how intolerant we are of the way other people are. That's what we have to look at. We have to look at it collectively. Tickets to Dr. Wayne Dyer's motivational seminar, "There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem," are available for $49 ($55 after March 15 and at the door). To charge by phone, call Ticketworks at (612) 343-3390 or online at ticketworks.com. For more information on Dr. Wayne Dyer, go to his website at www.drwaynedyer.com. Phil Bolsta is a writer, speaker and massage therapist in Plymouth, Minn. He teaches a free monthly class at Pathways in the Uptown area of Minneapolis called, "You Are Beautiful and You Are Loved," in which he demonstrates how affirmations can bring you peace, heal your life, and strengthen your connection to the deep love. For more information on class times, call Pathways at (612) 822-9061. Phil can be reached at (763) 553-7703 or at PhilBolsta@attbi.com. Copyright (c) 2002 Phil Bolsta |
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