Wayne Dyer - How to Be a No-Limit Person

[Music] the first 10 years of my life I spent uh in a series of foster homes and orphanages. My mother had um three boys by the time she was very young, in her early 20s, and my father abandoned his family. He just left. He took off one day. Well, I was born in 1940, and uh there was a depression in the world. There was a war getting going. Um, there was no welfare, there were no food stamps, things like that. So my brother Dave and I, uh my next oldest brother, uh went into a series of homes and ended up in a uh orphanage kind of place out in Mount Clemens, Michigan. And my oldest brother went with my grandmother, N9 or 10, and then and got us back [Music] together.

But being poor means you think poor. Self-worth comes from one thing: a belief that you are worthy. Teacher, therapist, consulting psychologist, and best-selling author, Wayne [Music] Dyer. Thank you, thank you so much. Enough, enough. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it so much. The uh topic, if there is such a thing for today, is uh choosing your own greatness, or uh being a no-limit person, taking charge of your own life. Something I really believe that you are the sum total of all of the the choices that you've made up until now. And anything about yourself or your life that you don't like, or isn't working, or is immobilizing you, is to be looked at in terms of, "Can I grow?" rather than, "Why did I do it?" or "Isn't this wrong?"

See, the two ways to motivate yourself are deficiency motivation, which says, "Where I am, I don't like. I don't like what I've done. I don't like the fact that I can't do this well, or I can't do that well." So I will list these things in my own repertoire, and then I will be constantly trying to repair those deficiencies, always assuming that I'm deficient, that there's something wrong with me, and I'm trying to fix it. And when you do that, you spend your whole life doing that, and you never arrive. Because your life becomes a series of trying to get someplace else. And it is, if you follow that, if you live that, if you behave that, then what you, what happens to you is you become a person who will always suffer from this disease called "more." You always have to have more. Because whenever you are getting where you want to go, let's say you want $100,000 in the bank, and you work, and you struggle, and you deny yourself, and you do all of those things, and you finally, finally you get there. And here you are, you got $100,000 in the bank. All of this stuff over here is a course your life, and that is all you know. That's what you know how to, that's how you are. That is your being. That is your way of being. So that when you do get here, what you will do is say, "This is not enough."

You must. A no-limit person is never operating from deficiency or from lack in their life. They're never saying, "I don't have enough." You see, you're never going to get enough. You already are everything. You're everything that you need. Think of it for just a moment. Everything that you need to have total bliss, perfection of your life, you already are. You already have it. You came into this world with nothing. That's how you're going out. And the time that you have here, it, what you have is your uniqueness, your specialness, and you don't need anything else. Now, think on this: If you don't know how to appreciate what you have and where you are in your life, you don't need anything else. Because if you do get something else, you won't know how to appreciate that either. You'll just want more, or you'll want it to be different, or you want it to be the way it used to be, or you'll want someone else to be the way you think they should be.

Successful people, or no-limit people, or self-actualizing people, or inner-directed people, however you, whatever labels that have been put on them by great thinkers and philosophers and therapists and people, uh, that have looked at human beings. These kinds of people are people who always have enough. There are some people, if you invite them over, and you say, "Um, you know, I'd like you to, uh, I'd like you to come over tonight, and I'd like you just stay over if you can, instead of having to drive back." And they'll say, "Well, can you say, can you stay?" And I say, "Well, I don't know if I can stay or not." "Um, well, you could sleep on the cot." "Oh, no, no. I could never sleep on the cot. I, I can't sleep on cots. I got a sciatica, don't you know that? I have, I have back pain, and I, the cats, no, that's out of the question. I couldn't sleep on a cat." Uh, and what about breakfast? "Well, we don't have any food, but, um, we have some old grapefruit that are in the, uh, in the, uh, refrigerator. They have a few spots on them." "Oh, no. I could never eat grapefruit spots. No, thanks. I can't eat grapefruit spots. I just couldn't do that." You know, uh, and these are people who, uh, never have enough. They are, are not able to be flexible and to change.

And there are other people. If you say, "Would you like to sleep over? We got a place in the sewer." "Hey, that'd be great! I can handle that. No problem. I slept there before. It's all, and all we have is grapefruit." "Oh, I love grapefruit." "Well, we got this, got spots." "Oh, I really like grapefruit spots. Those are terrific. I'll, I'll go for those." There are some people who can handle anything. Not because their circumstances are different. You see, your circumstances have very little to do with your fulfillment in life. Very little. It's, it's how you're approaching your circumstances. It's your attitude towards your circumstances that make all the difference in the world. And taking what you are and accepting it. I got to show you this. I don't know if the camera can get this. This is a little, uh, advertisement that was in the Detroit Free Press, uh, for, uh, last September. I was giving a speech at the Unity Church of Today in Detroit, and it says, "Dr. Wayne Dyer will talk about your inner child and how to deal effectively with problems in all relationships." And it was a real nice ad. You can see that. Then on top of the ad, in the same paper, there's another ad. And the ad says, "Face [Laughter] it. Right on top of my head. There's no hiding from hair loss." And they got a picture of a guy with a box over his head, and they have a before and after guy. And the after guy looks like he's just found fulfillment. And it says, "You can't run and you can't hide. Hair loss is a problem. And unless you take action, it will continue."

Now, we've got to look at this, uh, in terms of, uh, what I can do with this and how I can handle this. See, my daughter helped me with being bald a long time ago. She said, "Dad, you're not really bald. Don't think of yourself that way. She said, you're just about this much taller than your hair. That's all." Which is sort of a nice way to look at it too. I just sort of outgrew my hair. I sort of transcended my hair, if you will. Right? No-limit people are human beings who take what they are and accept it and don't tell themselves that somehow they're deficient because of anything about themselves. This is a very crucial, uh, concept for, for me, and for virtually all of us. It's this idea of taking your life in your own hands and being the kind of person that you choose to be. And understanding that everything that comes your way is an opportunity, is a blessing. And it wasn't until I learned how to celebrate virtually everything that came my way that I was able to transcend it.

You see, everything that was given to us by God, whatever that is, is perfect. No one can deny the mountains are perfect, and the rivers are perfect, and the birds are perfect, and the hippopotamuses are perfect, and, and, and so on. This is just what was given to us. Everything else that you have on our planet, planet that we have on our planet, comes about as a result of thinking. Thinking. Thought makes it so. All right. This microphone comes about as a result of thinking. Somebody imagines it. Somebody then tells somebody else about it, and it's, and it creates it. The dress that you're wearing, the shirt that I'm, the shoes that you have, the stage, these cameras, everything that you see that wasn't given to us was created by man as a result of the way that we think. The way that we think. So what gets inside of us as a cell comes about as a result of the way that we choose to think in our lives. Very important principle to understand. Because once you get a hold of thinking, and that it creates everything that you have in your life, you can change and make it as absolutely perfect as you want it to be. Because thought makes it so.

Creative visualization is what we're talking about here. You, you, the imagery or the image that you have of anything in your life is really like mental behavior. It's like going out and practicing. If you go out and practice with a basketball, shooting, uh, free throws over and over again, that's physical practice. Imagery is mental practice. It's mental behavior. When you have an image that you can succeed at at something, when you have an image that you can do it, rather than that you can't do it. When you get into your car and you have an image that you're going to find a parking place, rather than that there'll be no place to park, so you're not looking for no place to park. You will start acting on the image that you have, very much like you will start acting on the practice that you have when you're shooting baskets, or when you're hitting a forehand, or or working on your soup, or anything else that you're doing.

Bucky Fuller, who I served with on the Hunger Project Advisory Council for nine years, who died not too long ago, said that 99% of who you are, you can't touch. You can't see. You can't smell. 99% of you is untouchable, unsellable, invisible. It is what Ken Kaai has called your, your conscious awareness. It's your, it's what looks out behind those eyeballs. What is that? It isn't, it isn't cells. It's some kind of conscious awareness that you are. And make no mistake about it, you've occupied a whole lot of bodies already. Now, this is not reincarnation talk. Although, I don't know about this reincarnation. People ask me if I believe in it. I said, "Well, I taught in a junior high school in the inner city of Detroit for four years, and I saw those dead bodies come to life every day at 3:00. So I believe in reincarnation." All right.

Now, if what you, if 99% of who you are, you can't touch, and you can't feel, and you can't smell, then where, what is it? Who is it? Where are you? What is this thing called your essence, or who you are? And where does it go? Now, think of this: You were in a body. I have a little baby girl who's 11 months old, and she, and we were all in a body that size. Well, it's only a body about this big. Got fingers only this long, you know. Got, uh, tiny, tiny little parts all over the place. I mean, she's only this tall. Now, is that her? Is that her essence? Because I have other children who are much older, and I am much older than that. And I can remember being three and being in a different body. Still me. Still my essence. There. Different body. Totally different. Doesn't even look anything like when I was 11 months old. And then I was 13, and I had a funny body at 13. But still my essence was there in a whole new body. Hairs growing all over the place that I didn't understand. All kinds of things happening to it, you know. Then hairs falling out of it later on, you know. Looking at those hairs that fall out and say, "What held it in yesterday?" You know, what? I don't know. I don't even understand that. That's okay. And so it's like, who I am has been in many, many bodies already. All right.

And that essence, you see, everything on our planet that is alive can never die. It can never die. Life doesn't die. It just transforms. It just moves on to new places and new ways of being. New ways of being. And the way of being that is the most transcendent of all is this way that comes from seeing yourself as love, and only having that to give away. Only having that to give away. Let's say I would to stand up here in front of you and just visualize for a moment that I have an orange. And I take this orange and I squeeze it as hard as I can squeeze it. Okay? What's going to come out? Juice. What kind of juice? Orange juice. Orange apple juice? Any chance once in a while? Come on now. And then little mango juice come out of an orange once in a while? No mistakes, right? Never. No matter what. Next question. Everybody passes. These are easy. Okay. Why, when you squeeze an orange as hard as you can squeeze it, does orange juice come out? Because that's not because it's an orange. Because that's what's inside, isn't it? On our planet, when you squeeze something, what comes out of it is what's inside. Not too difficult, right? Does it matter if your mother squeezes the orange? Does it matter what instrument she uses? Does it matter if you just had your period and then you squeeze an orange? Does it matter if your boss squeezes it? How about if your kids do it? Your kids squeeze it on. Does it matter? Does it matter what time of day? Suppose they do it at noon. All right. How about at 4:00 in the morning? Does that matter? Whenever you squeeze an orange, the only thing you get out is what's inside, right? No arguments. Same thing works for you. Same principle works for you. It's a principle of the universe. All right.

Someone squeezes you. That is, someone puts pressure on you. Someone says things about you that you don't like. Someone puts, uh, attention on you. Whatever. Your boss says something to you that you don't like. And out of you comes anger. And out of you comes hatred. And out of you comes fear. Or out of you comes stress. Or out of you comes tension. Why is it? Because of your boss? The way they squeeze? Never. Is it because of your mother? I mean, she really can be a pain sometimes, right? Is it because of your children? No. What comes out of you always, when someone squeezes you, is what's inside. This is the, the vital principle of being a no-limit person. It's so crucial to get this and understand that that if you have any hatred in your heart for anyone in this world, or any anger, or any fear, or any of those things, it has nothing to do with the rest of the world. It only has to do with what you put inside. Now, how does what gets inside of you get there? That's the key. How does it get there? As you think. Only as you think. You see, there's no anger in the world. There's no stress in the world. There's no tension. It's perfect. We've already esta, it's a perfect place. It works just fine. It's all flowing the way it's supposed to flow. The evidence for it is, it is. That's all the evidence you need. Just look around you. Everything out there is a miracle. Everything, including you. There are no mistakes. It's all perfect. And everything that happens to you in your life, whether it's a trauma, whether it's a disease, whether it's somebody treating you in a certain way, there's a lesson in all of it.

No-limit people understand the lesson in life and therefore celebrate the lessons. It's true. And when you get to that point in your life where you're not cursing the things that come your way and blaming the things that come your way, and particularly blaming it on somebody else. And you hear it all the time, "She hurt my feelings." How's that possible? How can anybody hurt your feelings? Your feelings come from your thoughts. No one can hurt your feelings without your consent. No one can make a fool of you without your consent. No one can embarrass you without your consent. These are choices that you have that come from the way that you think. Someone calls you a name, "Hey, stupid!" And you turn around, "I didn't even tell anybody I was coming. How did they know that?" H. And then you blame the person who called you a name, instead of saying, "That's just their opinion. That's just where they are. That's where they are on the path, and it's okay."

All of you are in relationships, right? Everybody has a relationship of some kind or another. In your relationship, you have any problems? Any of you have a relationship you don't have any problems? I'd like you to take this microphone. I want to sit down and listen to you. Everybody in a relationship has problems, don't they? Right? Now, when you say, "I'm in a relationship, I got problems, therefore there's something wrong. Something's really wrong." Right? Now, if you're in a relationship and you have problems, and something is wrong, you got to call in a consultant, right? You got to call in somebody to help you with the problems. You don't want the problems to go on. Who you going to call in? You only got yourself. It's all you got. You might get a therapist once in a while, but they got worse problems than you do. The only consultant who can help you with your problems is you. And who is that consultant? That you're calling in? We've already established that there's something wrong with that person, right? Something wrong. So now you're going to call in a disabled person to deal with your problems in your relationship, right? Now, this is a really sick approach to clearing your problems. You got somebody who says, "We got a problem. You don't talk to me, and I don't talk to you. And you came home last week, and this week I called you, and you didn't call. And I was supposed to call you, and then you didn't do it." And how can you do that? Now, this is the consultant you're calling. "Excuse me, would you come in and help us?" "I don't know if I can help you or not. I didn't come home." That's the person you got to deal with your problems.

All right. Now, what you can do is you can change all of that around. You can say, "I'm in a relationship, we got problems. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the way things are. You know, my problem is that you are different than I am, and you think differently than I do, and you behave differently than I do, and you smell different than I do, and you have all of these attitudes over here that I don't have." Nothing wrong with that. That's the way it is. When two people get together in a relationship, you don't have two people becoming one. If you do that, then what you end up with are two half persons. Who wants a half a person in a relationship? You always are single, even if you're married and for, you know, and involved in a relationship for, you're still always single. You're still always you. Your unique, special, perfect self that is not trying to love, but who is love, who lives love, who is being love.

The same as if you pray to God and say, "God, will you please help me with my problems?" and want God to do it for you. Never happens. You've got to be God. Not be afraid to carry God around inside of you. If you want to get healed, you have got to understand that you're not going to get healed if you are asking someone else to heal you. And ask any doctor, if you know any surgeon, particularly, who's taking somebody into surgery, and ask them which person has a better chance of living and surviving serious surgery. Is it the one who has a will to live? Or is it the one who's just given up? And the cases are exactly the same. All right. But the person who has that will, which we can't define, you can't go out and get a bucket full of will and bring it in there. It's an attitude. It's an approach. It's a belief. All right. That you can do something. And when you have that belief about yourself, then you know you've got a so much better, uh, opportunity to be well in your life. And a belief is everything. I don't know if you've ever thought of that. Uh, I watch a little girl, five years old, learning how to swim. And she's holding on to the edge of the pool, and she wants to get over here to the steps. And it's just, uh, five feet or six feet. And she'll let go, and then she'll hold on again. And she'll let go, and she'll hold on again. And finally, there comes a time when she lets go and goes for it. Okay. You've all seen, you've seen this with your children. You've seen. And what you're asking yourself is, in the moment before that, when she was holding on, and then look at the moment afterwards, does she have any different skills? What's changed? Yeah, the skills are, she didn't have any new skills. She didn't learn any skills in that second. What she has is a belief that she can do it. And when you believe it, when you really just believe that you can do it, that's what allows you to swim. And when you think about it now, do you know how to swim? So when you dive into the water, you don't think about that. You just know when you dive into the water, you can swim. You don't have any necessary swimming skills or anything like that. Or when you get on a bicycle, you get on, you know that you're going to, unless you believe you can't. Because you've never gone out there and tried it and worked on it and done it.

Told a story of a patient of yours who had that very problem, who said she didn't know how to ride a bicycle. Yeah, Gail, who came to me many years ago. And you know why she said she couldn't ride a bicycle? Because her mother wouldn't let her get on one. Cop out. Yeah. Absolutely. And she had these beautiful big white teeth, and her, uh, mother had always told her, "You could fall and break your teeth, and I wouldn't want that to happen to you." So here she was now, in her 30s, and, uh, telling me that she couldn't ride a bike. And she was in therapy. And, um, I said to her, "Okay, let's go." She said, "Go where?" "Are we going?" "I said, well, I've got a bicycle downstairs, and I'm going to, uh, show you how to ride a bike. I'm going to have you teach yourself how to do this." And she said, "Look, I didn't come here to pay you the kind of money that I'm paying you to have you teach me how to ride a bicycle. I came here to find out why I can't." I said, "Oh, well, you're going to need another 30 seconds of therapy. Easy." Okay. The reason you can't is because you never got yourself on a bicycle. And until you do, you never will know how. And you just believe that you can't. Oh, that's the end of that. There's no more to talk about that. Now, what we have to do is get you to get out there. And we went downstairs, and I had, it was a woman's bike. And I've helped a lot of people to teach themselves how to ride a bike. And what you do when you teach, you help someone to teach themselves how to ride a bike, because you don't teach anybody how to ride a bike. Okay? Uh, is you let them do it all themselves. You let them hold it. You let them balance it. You let them move with it. You let them put the pedal down and, and, and move it themselves. And you stand back. You say, "No, when you're ready." You know. And then you move it, and you hold on for a second, then you put your foot back down, and you, you practice it and practice and practice that all yourself, you know, with just someone encouraging you. And before long, in just a matter of minutes, when I tell you it was minutes, and this woman had never been on a bicycle before, she rode like two blocks on a bicycle. She couldn't believe that she now had a belief.

Being to me means seeing the greatness and the uniqueness in you and never letting anybody else convince you to the contrary. When people ask me, "Come on, you're always talking about being up, and you're always positive and so on. You mean to tell me that you're always that way?" This is, I say, "Yeah, yeah, I really am." And it isn't because I'm out there doing something in an artificial way. It's an authentic response to my having, having gotten the junk out of me. And the junk is the way that I used to think. The way that I used to think.

Think for a moment, if you can visualize right here, a clock. A big clock. And the hands on the clock go from 1 to 12. The clock starts right out here with the minute hand, and it goes over towards the three. The, uh, hour hand, minute hand. And that's the time in your life when you are moving away from yourself, from your true self. That's the time when you are trying to put other people down, trying to prove that you're bigger and better than somebody else, trying to make yourself right all the time, as opposed to, uh, being with somebody else. It's like you're moving away. And a lot of people spend a lot of time moving away from their true self. Because your true self is this little child. Is this beautiful little child inside of you that has only love and acceptance for everything in the world, and no disease, no absence of ease. You move away towards the three, and then you move down here this way, and you're still moving away from yourself until you hit the six. The six is the point in your life, symbolically, metaphorically, here, when you are the furthest away from yourself that you can be. It's the low point in your life. It's the point where many people break down, or many people break down their relationships, or they, they feel full of despair, they feel full of hatred, whatever it may be. And a lot of people die then. A lot of people are put into hospitals then. A lot of people have to really seek out therapy then, and so on.

And when you're at that six, there's another part of the clock that goes from 6:00 to 12:00. That I think of as, uh, living in the light. And this is when, and see, this clock hand never can go back. It can't go back. It can only go this way. It only goes this way, as does life. It only goes this way, forward. In this period, this place between 6 and 12, that's when you start coming back to yourself. That's when that's what enlightenment is. That's the pathway to enlightenment. When you send out that stuff that is destroying you, that is killing you in one way or another, and you move yourself back over here, and eventually you get yourself all the way back. This is the light over here. This is the place where you can't go back. You'll be tempted. You might be tempted to steal. You might be tempted to to use anger. You might even slip a little bit, and you catch yourself. I can, just too long ago, it was, uh, we, we, we got a problem with our sprinkler at at the, in my home. One of the sprinkler heads is off, and if you've ever seen that happen, you get a gusher going up there. And I've been wanting to get that thing replaced for the longest time. And I'm walking out of the bank, and there's a sprinkler head right there in front of the bank. Now, I practically own this bank. Okay? So I'm going to go there every day, and I do a lot of business with this bank. And I'm looking at this sprinkler head, and I think, "You know, all I have to do is just unscrew this thing. I wasn't honoring. They'll replace it tomorrow morning. It's, it's 98 cents or whatever." So I actually get down there, and I look, and I start turning the sprinkler. And then I start thinking, "Do I want this karma? Do you know, do I want to steal? Do I want to take?" I know it's only a 99 cents, and if I went into the bank, they'd probably give me one anyway if I asked them. And I turn, and I just turned it back, and I said, "If I want a sprinkler head, I'll go and buy one for myself. This doesn't belong to me." It, it was just like a split second of weakness there, or whatever. But it illustrated to me that I can't go back there. I could never. And there was a time in my life when I could have done that. I can be absolutely frank with that. I could do that. Uh, I can't go back there anymore. That's where you start. That's the place to start. Because when you get all of that out, when that's all gone, and I mean gone, and it only comes about as a result of the way that you think. So it's just changing around your approach to life, the way that you think in life. When that starts to go away, what you've become filled up with is what your natural self is, which is this loving, accepting, uh, not, not fighting the universe, but instead living in it and going with the flow, and all of the kinds of cliches that you've heard a thousand times. It is, that's the metaphor there. And you see, every time you try to go back, can't do it. You can't do it.

And the ingredients that make for a no-limit life are five, in my opinion. The first is quality rather than appearances. You begin to change your thinking from appearances and how things look and how other people view me, okay? Because every time you find yourself upset in life about anything that anyone else has said, what you're really saying is, "What you think of me is more important than what I think of me." All right. So you change from appearances to what I call quality thinking. Quality. What is the quality of my life, rather than how does it appear to others? Now, do you tell yourself that because my friends don't like me, that that means there's something wrong with me? Now, that's, see, that's what you have to learn. That another person's opinion is just that. It's their opinion, and that's all it is. Every time you are upset, or your children are upset, because of what somebody else says about them, including their peers, what you are really saying in that moment, and this is really important, what you're saying is, "What you think of me is more important than what I think of myself." And you must never give anybody that kind of power and control over you, because they will always have it.

The funny part about approval, for those of you who really want it, and re, now I'm here to tell you that I like approval. I enjoy it. I find it one of the most exciting things in the world. I like it when people read my books. I love it when people applaud. I like it when people, uh, tell me nice things. And all, I like approval. I'm the first one to admit it. What I don't do is I don't need approval. There's a big difference between wanting approval and needing approval. When you need approval, it means you become immobilized when you don't get it, from making other people's opinions more important. Now, for those of you who say, "Yeah, but I want approval and I need it, and if I don't get it, and so on." Then understand this: The people who get the most approval in life are the ones who care the least about it. And the ones who get the least approval are the ones who are are always going after it. So if you want approval, in this paradoxical way that I'm talking about, it, stop needing it. Stop concerning yourself about it. Ask yourself, "Who gets the most approval in life?" Think of the person that gets the most approval, and you'll see that that person couldn't care less what other people are thinking. They're so busy being, they don't have time to notice what their neighbors are doing.

The Rumi said this. He said, "If you advance confidently in the direction of your own dreams and endeavor to live the life which you have imagined, you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." What that means is that success is not something that you can get in life. Success is an inner process. Success is something that you bring to everything you do in your life. It is isn't something you get out of what you do. And when you get that, and you learn how to get the junk out, and advance confidently doing what makes the most amount of sense to you based on your inner signals, and the one issue of morality, which is, you never interfere with anybody else's right to do the same. Each person has their own right to advance confidently in the direction of their own dreams. And when you violate that, you're violating the principle of the universe, the essence of the universe, which is cooperation and harmony. Then success will begin to chase you, and it will come into your life and arrive in your life in amounts that you never dreamt of before. That you never dreamt of. Things will start happening to you that you would never imagine before.

I'm working on a book right now that's going to be called, "You'll See It When You Believe It." When you start believing in some of these principles, you'll start seeing things that you were blind to for so long, when you were back here in the two and the three and the four and the five, when you are moving away from yourself. As long as you're moving back towards your universal essence, your harmony with yourself, your cooperation with the rest, things will start happening in ways that you never dreamt of. Jung called it, uh, synchronicity. And we, it's, it's a term that we use to to explain how unexplainable coincidences sort of happen in our life. And how come these things happen? I'm going to share a couple of those with you before we leave.

The quality versus appearance in your life means that you get that inner candle flame working in a way that gives you quality independent of what other people think of you. Maslow, in defining self-actualizing, no-limit people, said they are independent of the good opinion of other people. Of the good opinion of other people. Independent of it. They're so busy at advancing confidently doing the things that make sense and bringing success to changing their baby's diaper, and bringing success to weeding their garden, and bringing it to the job. They bring it on the airplane. So that when they run into somebody who is, who is rude to them, a stewardess that is rude, they don't see it as an attack on them. It's just where they are. And they send them love. Help them a little bit, you know. They're kind to. When somebody wants to get in on the freeway, and they're, one old temptation when they were on the one to the six side was to say, "Oh yeah, nobody's getting in front of me. I'm getting there first." It's like they slow down a little bit. They don't have all that type of stuff of having to beat somebody else and having to defeat somebody. It is, it's a new way of being. It's a way of quality where your harmony allows you to cooperate, and you are a part of what this whole thing is about. New way of being: quality rather than appearances.

Another new way of being, very important: living your life on ethics rather than rules. Ethics rather than rules. All these rules, all these ways of having to do things somebody else dictates to them. Do you know that some of the most immoral acts in the world have been perpetrated in the name of the rules? These are the laws. What do you think Nazi Germany was all about? Everybody doing all these horrible things to other people. "I'm only doing my job." Was the defense we all heard at Nuremberg. "I was just doing my job." If it's an immoral rule, it's immoral to obey it. And self-actualizing people, as Maslow tells us, have rules inside of them that they could never o, never disobey, ever. And they have to do with ethics. How you treat people. How do you think we get to where we are now? You know who Rosa Parks was? The woman in the South, the black woman in the South, who said, "Not today. I'm not going to the back today. No way." I know what the, the rules are. The rules were all over the place. If you needed a reminder, there were signs every place. Colored in the back, white in the front. And she said, "No, I'm sitting here." And that made all the difference. Ethics, not rules. When your children start disobeying rules that need to be disobeyed, don't be surprised.

When I was in the service, they had a policy on Guam, where I was stationed, which would not allow the Guamanian civilians to shop in the PXs, in the Navy exchanges. But they did allow all other civilians to shop in the Navy exchanges and PXs. But if you were Guamanian, that is, if your skin was dark, and your eyes were shaped a little different, then you couldn't. A clear outright violation. I was a serviceman. I was in the Navy. I was a communications cryptographer. They had a, a newspaper on the Guam Daily News, and it said, "An invitation to speak your mind." And it was a letter-writing contest. And they offered $75 to the first prize winner. $75. This was 1961. That was a fortune to me. That was a month's pay in the Navy at that time, almost. So I entered the contest, and I knew I would win it. I had already written a novel at that time, a whole novel, I'd written while I was on Guam. I knew it wasn't going to be a contest. I felt sorry for the other people entering it. I knew I was going to win this. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that when you're in the service, and you have an opinion, and you don't submit it to the chain of command, that you can be court-martialed for that. So the headlines on next week's Guam Daily News were, "US Sailor Assails Policy of Discrimination." Big hot stuff. All right. And I was called before a Vice Admiral, Commander Naval Forces, Mariana Islands, and threatened with a court-martial because I had disobeyed the rules, even though the rule was immoral.

There are lots of them like that. And when I went in, and they threatened me with the court-martial, I told them, "This was my battle plan." They didn't have Xerox machines in those days, so I had to get a lot of carbon paper. I wrote a letter to the President, John F. Kennedy, and I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy, and I wrote a letter. I was, my hometown was Detroit. I wrote a letter to the Detroit News, and a letter to the Detroit Free Press, telling them what was happening to me as a result of just expressing my opinion about an immoral act that was going on over here on Guam. And I showed the naval, uh, uh, Vice Admiral my letters right there. I said, "I've only sent the one to the President and the Secretary of the Navy. These letters go to the newspapers across the country. There's one there to the New York Times as well, in the Los Angeles." It was, uh, and I just spread them out before him. I said, "If you court-martial me or punish me in any way for this, then what's going to happen is the world is going to find out about this policy, and I'm prepared. I'm ready. I can handle it." And I was 20 years old at the time, or 21. Not only did I get a blessing from that, because all things come in blessings for you, I got out 90 days early. And they stamped on my record "PI" because the President took it up and sent it to the Secretary, must have. And I never heard from him. But I, uh, the PI on your record means political influence. And they don't like anybody with political influence in the military. And as soon as they saw that, they said, "This is somebody we probably will be, uh, giving a discharge real soon." There was no, there was no court-martial. And in September of 1962, a brand new policy was initiated on Guam, which allowed any civilian to shop in the Navy exchanges. And it came about as a result of someone saying, "These rules are immoral, and therefore it's immoral to obey them." New ways of being: ethics rather than rules. And when your kids want to know why, "How come these rules are so stupid? How come we have to do this?" Encourage them to change them. My mother always did that. She would have to help me get out of the out of the messes that I got myself into because I, I, I did it in my impetuous youth. I would just, when they would say to me, "What's more important, your job or school?" I was just honest. I said, "My job, of course." That's how I felt in those days. But what you put out in the world is exactly what's coming back to you. And if you find things coming back to you that you don't like and don't understand, don't ask yourself why these things are coming to you. Ask yourself what you're doing to make them come back to you. And when you start putting the responsibility on yourself, you'll start seeing dramatic changes. Dramatic changes.

A new way of being: instead of ethics, instead of rules, ethics. A new, another new way of being: instead of looking all your life for achievements and externals, try living your life on knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Knowledge instead of achievement. For the sake of knowledge. Being in a in a context in which you don't have to collect a lot of merit badges. You don't have to collect a lot of, a lot of, uh, awards and other people's, uh, value judgments. That you go to school, or you go out into the world, or you read, or whatever it is you do, because it makes sense to you, not because of what somebody else is going to put on a transcript or where you're going to appear in a class list. We need to help our children to understand and value the importance of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and doing things that make sense, rather than taking the easy way. Knowledge rather than always trying to achieve. We are in an achievement-oriented society, which tells us that we evaluate and judge a human being based upon how many achievements he has. But most of the people who get caught up in that trap and are always in this circle of trying to get ahead, trying to always get ahead, their reward for that almost always is higher blood pressure, ulcers, early deaths, and even things like cancer. We're beginning to find out are related to the kinds of stresses that we have. And remember, it's a perfect universe. There's no stress in it. There's only people thinking stressful thoughts. And when you put that pressure on yourself to always achieve and get ahead of the other guy, you miss what it's really all about. There's nothing wrong with goals. It's falling in love with them that's the problem. It's not being able to be flexible and be alter them. If you have a goal to get here, to get $100,000 in the bank, to get to this promotion, to get two cars in your garage, to whatever it is that your goal is, and you're on your way to that, and you're always working at the goal, all of this stuff on your way to the goal is called striving. And that's what you learn. Striving. Striving is a very low-level place to be. When you get to your goal, because all you've ever known is striving, you will just always suffer from this disease called "more." You will just upgrade your goal to $200,000, four cars, and two houses, and another wife, and a younger one, and, and all of these kinds of things. If you have a goal and you understand that every step along the way is a present moment to enjoy and to live.

Then the goal won't become any obsession. I don't have any goals in my life. People ask me, "Where are you going to be 5 years from now? What are you going to be doing? What's next for you?"

I just, uh, I remember what Lincoln said. Who, to me, was like the greatest person who ever sat in that White House. He said, "I never had a policy." He said, "I just tried to do what made the greatest amount of sense each and every day of my life as I sat there as the President of the United States." And I think there's, there's something really significant in that. That you don't have to get it all planned out and follow a certain pattern and do it a certain way. If you just sort of trust your inner instincts and go with that and live each moment, the goal stuff will all take care of itself. But if you're sacrificing and pushing your life aside and, and, uh, suffering on your way to trying to get someplace, you'll never get there. It will always elude you because once you get there, you'll just have to upgrade it. And that's because that's all you'll know.

Oneness is that purest form of sanity, living in this moment and enjoying it. And all the rest of it will sort of work its way out. Another new way of being for me is to think of yourself in terms of personal authority rather than being an authoritarian. Personal authority. A person who has authority never needs to dominate anyone else, ever. Dominating doesn't become necessary. In business, you can have authority. The people who have the most authority are the ones who listen the most and the ones who are the most conscientious about what do other people have to say. A person in a relationship who has to dominate somebody else and has to make the other person submissive shows that they don't have authority because they're getting their power not from within for themselves, but on the basis of who they can control. And that never lasts. That never lasts. The only thing that lasts is having inner power. If you will know thyself, that's what Shakespeare said, "Know thyself." The more you know yourself, the more you, the more you become honest with yourself. Uh, honesty becomes just a way of life.

No, I don't think the world necessarily does. But you can't run your world. You can't run your world based upon what the rest of the people in the world want or don't want. To me, honesty is like it's a karma that goes out into the world. How people treat you in the world is their karma. How you react is yours. And what, when you react to it with dishonesty, that's what you're putting out into the world. Dishonesty. And when you put this honesty out into the world, that's what's going to come back to you because what goes out is what comes back. That all as you sow, so shall you reap. I mean, it's, it's in every great, uh, institution that there is in the world, whether it's a religion or a philosophy or whatever. What you put out is what comes back. Whatever you plant is what you're going to get back. And the more that you put out honesty, just because it's what you are, because you are being honesty, you're not trying to be honest, you are just being honesty, then that's what will come back to you on a regular basis. And when it doesn't, you'll just see that as another test for you to pass.

And finally, a fifth way of being that is new for me, it has become a way of life. It's called serenity instead of acquisitions. The more you try to acquire, the more you try to get, the more you try to collect in your life and evaluate yourself on the basis of that, the less serenity you're going to have. More is less. It's almost a secret of the universe. Serenity means inner peace. Means that you can, uh, find joy in every moment that you have in your life instead of always looking for it. It means that, um, while you are, uh, uh, driving along the countryside, you know, and seeing, uh, instead of saying, "This is, I'm on my way to this point," that you can open your eyes and see it with new eyes. See, see the rolling mountains, see the grass, see the deer, see the sky. See, you can just stop wherever you are in this second, wherever you are, and just look around you. And you can begin to appreciate just your, your surroundings and your environment. Then you can begin to appreciate the people that are in your life. And even the ones that are negative and, and that you're having the most difficulty with, you can practice a new way of being with them, which is sending them love. Sending them flowers, send them a book, send them a tape, send them something. And just see what kind of reaction that you get. Super emotional health is just an attitude. An attitude is everything.

I want to, uh, summarize these new ways of being and, and give you the most important, uh, ingredient on the path as we leave. I said that, uh, it's quality in your life to be focusing on rather than appearances. And it's ethics rather than rules. And it's knowledge rather than achievement all the time. And it's being personally an authority on yourself rather than authoritarian and trying to be dominating someone else or to be dominated. And serenity, which is the name of my little go girl, my youngest daughter, Serena, um, rather than acquisition and accumulations and trying to prove yourself that way. And when you get that serenity, which comes from the way that you think always, then you will replace all of the other junk that keeps you back here between 600 and one on that clock. And once you pass it, once you get past it, you'll never ever be able to go back because the light, living in the light is a way of, it's a way of being that if you're not there, you don't get it yet. But once you see it and once it begins to, and take over your life, you can never go back. That be, that is your purpose. It isn't your purpose isn't to try to be loving. Your purpose is to be loved and only have that to give away.

Well, but there's one other ingredient and it's really crucial. Forgiveness is the vital ingredient on the path of enlightenment. And if you don't know how to do it, then practice sending out love. Take the person or the people that, that you're having conflict with any place in your life, send them something. You don't have to even do it physically, just send them something that comes from inside. And what's inside is how you choose to think. And if you can make that love and do that, and that is to me the test. Not whether you can love someone when they smell good, when they do everything that you're supposed to, but whether you can love someone who has sent you hate or anguish in your life and send it back. You don't have to forget, you don't have to go back, but you got to get it out of you because it is blocking you and holding you back. And when I said, "You'll see it when you believe it." All my life I had wanted to write fiction, a parable. Three, four years ago, I decided to go off to Hawaii, to Maui, to Kapalua Beach, and to write. Now, the books that had met the most difference in my life were The Little Prince, Siddhartha, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Gulliver's Travels. Parables, teaching parables, stories that can tell a message.

I went over to Maui and I sat down on the beach. And I'd been talking about writing this. I'd been talking about doing this. And it was something that, and I have a little girl, and her name is Sky. S-K-Y-E. I decided to reverse the letters in her name, E-Y-K-S, and put an "I" in there, which symbolizes the self. I-U-S. And I just created this parable of a woman whose name is IUS, who lives on another planet. The planet is Uranus. And it's a duplicate mirror image of Earth. Only IAS can only see things as they are, not as we would like them to be. And therefore, people are neurotic on Uranus because they have to be. She gives the anxiety attack report, if you will, because anxiety really does attack over there. And tells about anxiety coming in on the weekends and so on. Well, my visitor in my parable goes to Uranus, meets IUS. She cannot understand as he describes Earth why people would be neurotic by choice on Earth. Why would anybody be unhappy or depressed or miserable when they don't have, when anxiety doesn't attack, and when elevators really don't scare you? And when if you want a complex on Uranus, if you want to give a complex to your wife, you go to the store and buy one. And she, "What happened?" "Well, my husband gave me a complex." You know, and it's true. Whereas on Earth, if you have a complex, it's because you've chosen to have one. She can't figure it out. Okay. So she comes here, observes our people, and begins to see the secrets of the universe and gives us these secrets. Talks to the top leaders in our field. And that was my parable. And I wrote it. And she gives all of these wonderful secrets, some of which I've been talking about here today.

But what I want to tell you is that my wife gave me a license plate. And the license plate says, "IUS." Okay. It's a vanity plate. And I was pumping gas on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And a little man from Greece came up to me. And he said, "What means this FAS?" Uh, which is how you say that in Greek. And I said, "Well, that's just a word. It's my daughter's name spelled backward. It's a parable that I wrote." He said, "No," he said, "in Greek, that's a word." I said, "What could that word be?" He said, "It means best wishes." For all you'll see it when you believe it. The great big erroneous zone. The cosmic erroneous zone. If you get this one, you'll have it and understand it all. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. God bless you. Thank you.

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