Wayne W. Dyer - Youll See It When You Believe It

Youll See It When You Believe It

The Way to Your Personal Transformation

Wayne W. Dyer

To my wife, Marcie, my soulmate,

who walks this glorious path with me and

to our son, Sands Jay, who after five exquisitely beautiful

daughters is living proof of the theme of this book:

Believing Is Seeing

John Quincy Adams is well but the house in which he lives at the present time is becoming dilapidated. Its tottering on its foundations. Time and the seasons have nearly destroyed it. Its roof is pretty worn out. Its walls are much shattered and tremble with every wind. I think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it soon. But he himself is quite well, quite well.J OHN Q UINCY A DAMS

Contents

Y ou cannot drink the word water. The formula HO cannot float a ship. The word rain cannot get you wet. You must experience water or rain to truly know what the words mean. Words themselves keep you several steps removed from the experience.

And so it is with everything that I write about in this book. These are words that are meant to lead to the direct experience. If the words that I write ring true, it is very likely that you will take the ideas presented here and create your experience of them. I believe these principles and see them working all the time and want to share my experience of how they have worked for me.

You too see, in your own life, essentially what you believe. If, for example, you believe strongly in scarcity, think about it regularly, and make it the focus of your conversations, I am quite certain that you see a great deal of it in your life. On the other hand, if you believe in happiness and abundance, think only about them, talk about them with others, and act on your belief in them, it is a very good bet that you are seeing what you believe.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, Mans mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension. The principles that I write about in this book may require you to stretch to new ideas. Should you take these words and apply them to your life, you will feel the stretch marks in your mind, and you will never again return to the being that you were before.

The word it appears twice in the title of this book and refers both times to what could be called personal transformation. That transformation comes with knowing deep within you that each and every human being is far more than a physical body, and that the essence of being human includes the ability to think and feel, to possess a higher consciousness, and to know that there is an intelligence suffusing all form in the universe. You are able to tap into that invisible part of you, to use your mind in any way that you choose, and to recognize that this is your essential humanity. Your humanness is not a form or a body at all, but something much more divine, guided by forces that are always at work in the universe.

The principles in this book start with the premise that you are a soul with a body, rather than a body with a soul. That you are not a human being having a spiritual experience, but rather a spiritual being having a human experience. I have illustrated these principles with many experiences that are a part of my own personal transformational journey to bring the essential messages home to you. I know that these principles are working in the universe even as you sit and read these words. They are working independent of your opinion about them, very much like the principles of digestion and pulmonary circulation are working within your body right now without your help. Whether you believe in these universal principles or not, they are going to work. But should you decide to tune in to them, you may find yourself living at an entirely new level and enjoying a higher kind of awarenessan awakening, if you will.

As long as you resist, you will not see the benefits. By this I mean you will stay with your old ways, live the Ill believe it when I see it mentality. Hoard your toys and work even harder to accumulate more money. Continue to make appearances more important than quality. Live by rules rather than ethics. If you are only slightly wavering, then stay with what you are familiar with, until you can no longer resist. Because once you start to make the transformational awakening journey, there is no going back. You develop a knowledge that is so powerful that you will wonder how you could have lived any other way. The awakened life begins to own you, and then you simply know within that you are on the right path, and you dont even hear the protestations of those who have chosen something quite different for themselves.

I never imagined myself needing to change. I did not have a plan to change my old ways, or a set of goals to improve anything in my life. I felt confident that I had my life running the way I wanted it to. I was extremely successful professionally, and nothing seemed to me to be missing. Yet I have undergone a major transformation that has added a luster to each of my days that I never even contemplated a few years ago.

I was born in 1940, the youngest of three boys, all under the age of four. My father, whom I have never seen, abandoned this family when I was two. From all accounts, he was a troubled man who avoided honest work, drank excessively, physically abused my mother, and had run-ins with the law and spent some time in prison. My mother worked as a candy girl at a dime store on the east side of Detroit, and her weekly wages of seventeen dollars barely covered her streetcar and baby-sitting expenses. There was no aid to dependent children or welfare then.

I spent many of my early years in foster homes, where my mother visited me whenever possible. All I knew of my father was what I heard from others, particularly my two brothers. I pictured an abusive, noncaring person who wanted nothing to do with me or my brothers. The more I heard, the more I hated. The more I hated, the angrier I became. My anger turned to curiosity, and I dreamed constantly about meeting my father and confronting him directly. I became fixated on my hatred and on my desire to meet this man and get the answers firsthand.

By 1949 my mother had remarried and reunited our family. Neither of my brothers ever voluntarily mentioned my father, and my inquiries were met with a look that implied, Hes no damn good. Why do you want to know any more about him? But my curiosity and my bad dreams persisted. Often I would wake up sweating and crying after a particularly intense dreaming sequence about him.

As I grew into adulthood my determination to meet this man became even fiercer. I became obsessed with finding him. His side of the family protected him, because they felt that my mother would have him arrested for years of non-support. Yet I still asked questions, made phone calls to relatives I didnt even know, and made trips to meet his ex-wives in distant cities to discover what this man was like. Always, my search ended in frustration. I would run out of funds to chase down a lead, or I would have to return to my own personal responsibilities of being on active duty in the military, or going to college, or raising my family.

In 1970 I received a call from a cousin I had never met, who had heard a rumor that my father had died in New Orleans. But I was in no position to investigate it. At the time I was completing my doctoral studies, moving to New York to become an associate professor at St. Johns University, going through a painful divorce, and stuck in place when it came to my writing. In the next few years I co-authored several texts on counseling and psychotherapy. I knew that I did not want to continue writing for strictly professional audiences, and yet nothing else would come to me. I was stuck, personally (divorce), physically (overweight and out of shape), and spiritually (a pure pragmatist with no thoughts about metaphysics). My dreams about my father intensified. I would awaken in a fit of anger, having been dreaming about beating my father while he smiled back at me. Then came the turning point in my life.

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