In his latest book, "Manifest Your Destiny," internationally acclaimed, bestselling author, Wayne Dyer synthesizes universal concepts of manifestation from the ancient masters to the leading edge thinkers of our time, to present a clear and concise guide to help us bring what we most desire into our lives. 

Randy Peyser: What is the main message of Manifest Your Destiny?

Wayne Dyer: The essential message of my life right now, of which this book is a reflection, is that all of us have the capacity to attract to ourselves what seems to be missing in our lives. Whether it’s a healing, a relationship, a promotion, or whatever form of abundance you want to manifest in your life, you have much more power to be able to manifest it than you might think. 

RP: Where do we begin?

WD: We must honor our worthiness in order to receive what we want. In our society we are conditioned to believe that we are not worthy, and that it is even selfish to want to be able to attract things into our lives. We shouldn’t want things and we should be satisfied with no thing. Furthermore, we don’t deserve whatever we would like to have in our lives because we think we have been bad, we feel insufficient, or somebody else has convinced us that we’re not worthy. 

Feeling unworthy is like putting a huge obstacle into the God force, into the life force which is everywhere. This force is unlimited. It is always moving and always flowing. The ancient Hawaiians, the Kahunas, used the metaphor of the flow of a running stream to represent the divine force. So when you put a great big obstacle (your feeling of unworthiness), in front of a running stream, it’s not like it’s going to stop the flow of the divine force.  The divine force will just go around your unworthiness and flow someplace else. That’s exactly what happens when you decide you really would like to manifest something, but you’re simultaneously saying, “I’m really not worth it,” “I’m really not good enough,” or “I’ve been bad,” or “I’m a sinner.” The force will not work with you. It just doesn’t work with that which doesn’t think that it deserves it. We have to overcome our societal conditioning which says we are unworthy. 

There is a universal intelligence that we call God or Soul or Spirit or Consciousness, and it is everywhere and in all things. There is no place that it is not. What we have to do is figure out a way to reconnect to our Source, rather than seeing ourselves as separate from it. Almost all of our conditioning has told us that we can’t manifest. We believe we can’t attract to ourselves what we want because we think we are separate from God, and whether we are able to manifest anything is dependent upon whether God wants us to do that or not. But if we see ourselves as connected to God, or as reconnecting to our Source through meditation, then we can attract anything we want into our lives.

RP: You say, “We’re not in the business of creating, but of attracting.”

WD: That’s right. Everything that is created in the universe is here already.  We are not really creators as much as we are recombiners of everything. We have to stop the idea that we are going to create something out of nothing, but instead attract to ourselves what is already here. 

In Manifest Your Destiny, I describe this concept by using the metaphor of a plum tree. If you look at a plum tree, noticing its bark, roots, leaves, branches, blossoms and buds, and say, “What part of this is not plum essence?” the answer is, “It’s all plum essence.” When we see a plum we don’t say to ourselves, “Well this thing just showed up from the invisible spirit world of plumness and manifested in our physical world. Somehow this thing just appeared.” The truth is that the tree is meant to plum and it produces plums. It grows out of this world. And we are the same. 

We divide ourselves up into spirit and human, but essentially we are all a part of the same world. We grow out of this world and we are connected to everything in this world. In order for us to have what we want in our lives, we have to overcome the idea that somehow it’s coming from another world, or from another place, and instead, see it as a way of reattaching or reattracting or recombining all of the elements that we would like to have in our lives.

The problem is that we have allowed our egos, the part of us which believes that we are separate from God and separate from each other, to dominate our lives. Most people think that there is a monarchy, where God is the king and we are the subjects, and the subjects are inferior to this invisible king. But not only are we inferior, we are also stained by sin, and therefore, untrustworthy. If you subscribe to the notion of God as being separate from you, than you will always be lost, because you can’t even trust in your own untrustworthiness. Nor can you trust in God because everything that you attempt to trust is coming from someone who is not trustworthy to begin with. So everything that you think, feel or act upon is based upon coming from someone who is untrustworthy. Therefore, you’ll always be lost. 

RP: You state that we believe that God is a gigantic vending machine.

WD: Yes. We believe that God is like a giant vending machine in the sky. We put in our requests in the form of prayers, and then the vending machine dispenses these prayers based upon how well we’ve followed the rules that someone else has told us are God’s rules. 

Now there’s another way to look at this, where we see ourselves as not separate from God, but rather, as connected, as “pieces of God” if you will. If you take a glass of water and separate it from its source—the ocean—then pour the water away from its source and ask it to sustain life, it flitters away. It just evaporates. It can’t sustain life. That’s a metaphor for us when we separate ourselves from our source and believe that God is separate from us. God is like the ocean and we’re like that glass of water. We try to sustain life and do all that the source tells us that we are capable of doing, but if we do it alone, we wither away and collapse instead. 

RP: You mention that in order for us to manifest what we want, we need to align our intention with the Divine Intelligence.

WD: Exactly. We manifest from Spirit. Simply, when Spirit begins to rule in our lives, we can literally manifest or attract to us everything that we perceive to be missing. That’s really the essence of it. We are connected at the life force invisible level to everything in the universe. Everything that is observed in the physical world has as its source that which is invisible. This means we must surrender to the Spirit and to the invisible part of ourselves. Then learning to manifest is really nothing more than learning to manifest another aspect of ourselves.

When we really want to master anything, we must enter into the spirit of it.  And when we enter into the spirit of something, what we’re really doing is reproducing in ourselves the same qualities that whoever created it had. If you enter into the spirit of a concert, for example, you are really reproducing in yourself the same feeling and expression that the composer had. And if you enter into the spirit of Life, you are really reproducing in yourself the qualities of the Creator of that which allows something to be manifested and created in the first place. 

When we are really inspired in our lives we don’t think about how bad we feel, nor do we think about money or lack. When we’re inspired, everything seems to work. This is also when we seem to be in our highest levels of creativity. The word “inspired” comes from “in spirit.” To be inspired means that you have really left your body. For example, when Picasso was asked about his paintings, he said, “When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque, and I only allow my spirit to go in there and paint.” That’s what inspiration means, “in spirit.” You’ve got to trust in Spirit. As I’ve said, manifesting takes place from Spirit. It doesn’t take place from form, from the physical world. You’ve got to know that what you want to manifest will occur.

RP: In the process of writing my own book, I felt totally inspired. I realized that every word I wrote was written in joy. So I came to the conclusion that because it was seeded in joy, how could the end result be anything but joy?

WD: Absolutely. And in the process of manifesting, it’s also important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We’ve got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on our time schedule. There is a quote from A Course In Miracles which says, “Infinite patience produces immediate results.” When you know that you want something and you have infinite patience, your infinite patience means that you know it’s going to manifest. And the immediate result that you get when you know something is going to manifest is peace. Enlightenment is being immersed in and surrounded by peace, and to be peaceful at all moments in our lives is to be enlightened. 

What is important is the essence of what you want to manifest, rather than the thing itself. For example, you wanted to find a publisher, but the essence of what you wanted was really to get the word out there about your subject matter. What you really wanted was to fulfill your need to be a teacher. And that will be fulfilled. Once you know that and you are absolutely certain of it, the details will get handled.

RP: In Manifest Your Destiny you say, “Know that the end is secure, and let the ‘how’ take care of itself.”

WD: That’s right. Your job is to not say, “How.” Your job is to say, “Yes.”

RP: I remember seeing a quote one time which read, “God doesn’t care about your ability or your inability; God cares about your availability.”

WD: That’s very good. Our job is to just say, “Yes.” Then what we want will show up. It’ll be so simple and we’ll wonder why we made it such a struggle. We’ve got to figure out a way to detach, “to let go and let God,” as they say in AA. 

RP: When I found myself longing and waiting and wanting a publisher for my book, I tried to change my attitude and energy from “longing” to “anticipating.”

WD: And I would also add, “surrendering.” 

There are four pathways to mastery, the Pathways of Discipline, Wisdom, Unconditional Love and Surrender. The Pathway of Discipline is what we send kids to school for—to learn something, to practice, and to work hard. If you want to learn to hit a tennis ball, do your multiplication tables, or dance the macarena, you work, you struggle, and you discipline your body. This is what you did with your writing, you disciplined yourself, you sat down and you did the work.

The Pathway of Wisdom is when you apply your intellect to your discipline. “How do I do this?” “What form should this take?” “When is the best time to do this?” “Who should I consult?” This is what we think of as formal education. We assume that we’re educated once we have discipline and wisdom. But that has nothing to do with mastery.

For the Pathway of Unconditional Love, you have to love what you’ve done and do what you love. If you watch great masters or anybody who is really terrific at whatever they do, you’ll find that they exude a kind of love; they love what they are doing. Watch Barbra Streisand, or Rudolf Nureyev or Tiger Woods. They love what they do and they’re in it; they’re in the flow of it. 

But the ultimate pathway is the Pathway of Surrender. This is where you surrender the “little mind” to the “big mind.” You’ve done the discipline, you’ve applied the wisdom, you’ve fallen in love with what you’ve done, and now you surrender. You must understand that it’s not you, this puny, little skin-encapsulated ego that is going to be doing this thing. It isn’t going to be doing it at all. You are in this world, but you are not of this world. 

RP:  On your way to manifesting your destiny, did you ever feel resentful of those who seemed to have more than you did, or those who seemed to already be where you wanted to be? 

WD: No, honestly, I’ve never felt that in my life. And I did have a lot of lack, but I never experienced it. I grew up in the east side of Detroit, in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. Even growing up in an orphanage, I never woke up saying, “I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.” I never ever felt that I was unfairly treated. There were a couple of very affluent neighborhoods nearby, but I never thought for one second that those people had more than I had. It just seemed that they got what they were entitled to, and if I really wanted those things, then I would have them, too. 

Resist the temptation to compare yourself to others. This is crucial in order to be able to manifest whatever you want. There are 483,364 words in A Course In Miracles and the word “beware” only appears once—“Beware of the temptation to see yourself as unfairly treated.” You have to really watch out for the idea that what other people have means that you haven’t been fairly treated.

RP: You talk about the necessity of feeling gratitude for whatever we do have, rather than focusing on the feeling of lack or despair for what we don’t have. 

WD: Yes. Give thanks for all that shows up in your life including the stuff that you perceive to be negative, the things that you wish wouldn’t have happened. Don’t take anything forgranted. And understand that what you want to manifest is not for your personal ego, but rather to help you be an instrument of peace. I encourage people to do a morning and evening meditation on gratitude. 

RP:  You’ve mentioned that often before something wonderful happens, we experience some kind of fall.

WD: That’s from the Kabbalah, and it’s so true. Ultimately, the ability to get to a higher level in our life means that we have to generate the energy to be able to do so, and generally, we do that by a fall. Spiritual advances are almost always proceeded by a fall of one kind or another. 

RP: What are you wanting to manifest in your life?

WD: I have manifested everything I want in the way of physical things. I have a beautiful family and enough abundance to take care of them. Now I put my attention on manifesting for other people, helping those who are less fortunate. For example, I manifested the time and a publisher to write a book called, A Promise Is A Promise, about a woman whose daughter has been in a coma for twenty-seven years. This woman has cared for her daughter every two hours, twenty-four hours a day, for over a quarter of a century. I also donated all of the proceeds of this book to help this woman get out of debt. 

RP: Do you have any words of wisdom for people who are in search of discovering what their life’s purpose is? 

WD: It’s always about service. The highest pathway that we can get to, the Pathway of Surrender, is also called the Pathway of the Spirit. Jung talked about the archetypes of the Warrior, the Athlete, the Statesman, and ultimately the Spirit. When you’re asking the question about finding your purpose, you’re in the Athlete or Warrior stages. You’re asking the question, “What am I here for?” based upon what you are supposed to do with your body and your talents. But when you get past that, you realize that this isn’t who you are—you are not your body. Then you realize that the only thing you can do with your body and with your life is to give it away. 

As you realize this, you begin to say, “When am I most inspired? What do I most love to do?” and “How can I provide that for the greatest number of souls?” Then you’re guided to do that. It might be baking. It might be setting up a center for people with AIDS. It might be taking care of your children. It could be anything. It really doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re in service, as long as you’re in the place of the statesman or the spirit.

Before I speak, I ask over and over again in meditation, “How may I serve? How may I serve?” This helps me to keep my ego out of my talk. It keeps my attention off of “What’s in it for me?” or “How well am I going to do?” or “How much money am I going to make?” or “Are they going to like me?” I meditate to let go of all of that and to really get into the moment of what it is that I am doing.

RP: You also say, “Remind yourself that there are no ordinary moments.” 

WD: Yes. That’s from Dan Millman in The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.  Every moment is an eternity in itself. Bliss is the present moment and each and everyone of us needs to understand this. When we meditate, we are really trying to go beyond the mind. What I have found is that if I can get totally and completely into the moment, then the mind disappears. And as the mind disappears, that’s when God appears. 

You can do this in any moment in your life. There is no moment that isn’t equivalent in value to any other moment. You have to surrender the little mind to the big mind, and turn what you want over to God. Then you must trust and know that what you want to manifest will happen. If you follow the principals I write about, you’ll see your dreams manifest just like that.