Your Sacred Self

by Wayne W. Dyer

  Your Sacred Self

  Making the Decision to Be Free

  Wayne W. Dyer

  To my wife, Marcelene

  As the earth thanks the sun

  All my life I wanted to be somebody,

  Now, I am finally somebody….

  But it isn’t me.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Dear Reader

  Part I

  Preparing for the Sacred Journey

  1 Your Life’s Greatest Challenge: Making the Decision to Be Free

  2 Recognizing the Limitations of Your Past

  3 Releasing Old Beliefs

  Part II

  The Four Keys to Higher Awareness

  4 Banish the Doubt

  5 Cultivate the Witness

  6 Shut Down the Inner Dialogue

  7 Free the Higher Self from the Ego

  Part III

  Transcending Our Ego Identities

  8 From Turmoil to Peace

  9 From Deception to Truth

  10 From Fear to Love

  11 From Outward Appearance to Inner Substance

  12 From Striving to Arriving

  13 From Dominance to Tolerance

  14 From Toxicity to Purity

  Part IV

  Toward An Egoless World

  15 Creating a Collective Spirit of Sacred Selves

  Index

  About the Author

  Praise

  Books by Wayne W. Dyer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  DEAR READER

  Imagine this scene if you will. Two babies are in utero confined to the wall of their mother’s womb, and they are having a conversation. For the sake of clarity we’ll call these twins Ego and Spirit.

  Spirit says to Ego, “I know you are going to find this difficult to accept, but I truly believe there is life after birth.”

  Ego responds, “Don’t be ridiculous. Look around you. This is all there is. Why must you always be thinking about something beyond this reality? Accept your lot in life. Make yourself comfortable and forget about all of this life-after-birth nonsense.”

  Spirit quiets down for a while, but her inner voice won’t allow her to remain silent any longer. “Ego, now don’t get mad, but I have something else to say. I also believe that there is a Mother.”

  “A Mother!” Ego guffaws. “How can you be so absurd? You’ve never seen a Mother. Why can’t you accept that this is all there is? The idea of a Mother is crazy. You are here alone with me. This is your reality. Now grab hold of that cord. Go into your corner and stop being so silly. Trust me, there is no Mother.”

  Spirit reluctantly stops her conversation with Ego, but her restlessness soon gets the better of her. “Ego,” she implores, “please listen without rejecting my idea. Somehow I think that those constant pressures we both feel, those movements that make us so uncomfortable sometimes, that continual repositioning and all of that closing in that seems to be taking place as we keep growing, is getting us ready for a place of glowing light, and we will experience it very soon.”

  “Now I know you are absolutely insane,” replies Ego. “All you’ve ever known is darkness. You’ve never seen light. How can you even contemplate such an idea? Those movements and pressures you feel are your reality. You are a distinct separate being. This is your journey. Darkness and pressures and a closed-in feeling are what life is all about. You’ll have to fight it as long as you live. Now grab your cord and please stay still.”

  Spirit relaxes for a while, but finally she can contain herself no longer. “Ego, I have only one more thing to say and then I’ll never bother you again.”

  “Go ahead,” Ego responds impatiently.

  “I believe all of these pressures and all of this discomfort is not only going to bring us to a new celestial light, but when we experience it, we are going to meet Mother face-to-face and know an ecstasy that is beyond anything we have ever experienced up until now.”

  “You really are crazy, Spirit. Now I’m truly convinced of it.”

  This book you are holding in your hands is a literal interpretation of that metaphor, which I’ve adapted from a story told by Henri J. M. Nouwen. It is my attempt to introduce you to that glowing celestial light and to let you know the wonder of having your sacred self triumph over the demands of the ego self, which wants more than anything to hold you back.

  I have organized this book around the following four understandings:

  1. You are sacred, and in order to know it you must transcend the old belief system you’ve adopted.

  2. You are a divine being called to know your sacred self by mastering the keys to higher awareness.

  3. Your sacred self can triumph over your ego identities and be the dominant force in your life.

  4. You can radiate this awareness beyond your own boundaries and affect everyone on our planet.

  These understandings form the basis of the four parts of this book. Each chapter is written with the express purpose of helping you to specifically know these principles.

  The ancient spiritual writings in the Cabbalah have a very pertinent teaching that I would like you to come to know. It is suggested in them that our purpose here is to move from lower levels of living to higher and higher planes. But in order to move to the next level we must actually fall down first—to acquire and generate the necessary energy to propel ourselves to the next level.

  Thus every single fall that you experience is really an opportunity to acquire energy. The added energy provides the turbo boost to move up and fulfill your purpose on the next level. Your sacred self knows that your falls are necessary for the achievement of this goal.

  A fall in my own life gave me the opportunity to generate the necessary energy to put my life at the spiritual level that I write about in these pages. I could not have allowed this book to be published unless I made this jump to that higher spiritual level.

  The fall is always in divine order. Whether we choose to acquire the energy to move to a higher spiritual level is entirely up to each and every one of us. My message is clear. Use your falls to come to an awareness of the higher power and loving presence that is always with you. The energy that you acquire is similar to what the high jumper gets when he falls way back in order to propel himself over the bar at a higher level than before.

  I know this spiritual consciousness, and I trust that this book will help you to know that sacred self that is always with you.

  Love and Light,

  Wayne W. Dyer

  PART I

  PREPARING FOR THE SACRED JOURNEY

  BROKEN DREAMS

  As children bring their broken toys

  With tears for us to mend,

  I brought my broken dreams to God

  Because He was my Friend.

  But instead of leaving Him

  In peace to work alone,

  I hung around and tried to help

  With ways that were my own.

  At last I snatched them back and cried,

  “How can You be so slow?”

  “My child,” He said, “what could I do?

  You never let them go.”

  —Lauretta Burns

  1

  YOUR LIFE’S GREATEST CHALLENGE

  Making the Decision to Be Free

  The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.

  —IMMANUEL KANT

  I know in each moment

  I am free to decide.

  You have been facing the wrong way! The most important insight you can have is to realize that you have been facing the wrong way for the better part of your life.

  Take a moment, right now, to experience what I mean. Picture yourself in any position that
you like. Standing, sitting, lying down, whatever is easiest for you to imagine. Now look at that mental picture of yourself. What you see, in this exercise, is a you who is always looking away from yourself. Always looking outside of yourself. You are facing the wrong way!

  Now imagine being able to shift around and face the opposite direction. If you could in some magical way do so, then you would be facing inward.

  This is not some form of mental gymnastics in which you simply imagine yourself turning around and facing inward. I am suggesting a way of knowing your spiritual identity. I am suggesting you meet the challenge and take the path of your sacred quest.

  We’ve all been taught to look outside ourselves for sustenance—to look beyond the self for power, love, prosperity, health, happiness and spiritual fulfillment. We’ve been conditioned to believe we get life’s bounty from somewhere outside of ourselves. But it’s possible to reverse our gaze from outward to inward. And when we do, we find an energy we’ve sensed but not previously identified.

  DIVINE ENERGY

  There dwells within all human beings a divine energy. The power of this energy permeates our entire being and permits us to perform every function in the vast repertoire of human thoughts and behaviors. There are two aspects to this divine energy.

  The outer aspect causes the heart to beat, the lungs to inflate and the senses to function—it essentially keeps our physical bodies alive. The inner aspect of this energy is dormant, but it can be awakened.

  This inner universe is vaster than the outer universe. Inner joy makes all joy that is experienced in the world of the senses seem meaningless. When the divine light within you is experienced directly, it adds a radiance to life unlike anything that can be described with words or pictures.

  When you discover your sacred self, you awaken this dormant inner energy and let it guide your life. The word most commonly used to describe this inner force is “spiritual.”

  When I talk about spirituality and being spiritual, I am describing an attitude toward God and the inner journey of enlightenment. I am speaking of expanding the godlike qualities of love, forgiveness, kindness and bliss within ourselves. In my interpretation, spirituality is not dogma or rules. It is light and joy and focuses on the experience of love and inner bliss, radiating those qualities outward. I call the journey to discover your sacred self your “sacred quest.”

  DEFINING YOUR SACRED QUEST

  The primary energy that you have been using all your life is the outer energy. This outer energy is life sustaining but does not provide the sense of fulfillment and bliss that we long for.

  In his book Mystery of the Mind Swami Muktananda describes what the direct experience of divine energy is like:

  One day this light will explode, and you will see it everywhere. You will see the entire universe existing within it. The divine light of Consciousness will begin to fill your eyes, and then wherever you look you will see it. You will see its radiance in people, in trees, in rocks, and in buildings. You will see the same consciousness rising and falling in every wave of thought and feeling that passes through your mind; wherever your mind goes you will find your own inner Consciousness, the creator of the world. You will see that the entire universe is contained within your own Self. You will know that everything—all the infinite modifications of the world—is nothing but your own play. You will realize that it is you who are being reflected everywhere and that it is your own reflection that passes before you all the time.

  You have within yourself this power of transcendence over the ego-dominated life. You can turn around and face inward, directly contacting your spiritual nature. You can then live each of your days, regardless of what you may be doing, with the sense of bliss that comes from being on the path of your sacred quest.

  Making that light explode for yourself involves understanding who you are and what it is that you are doing here in this thing called your body, on this place called earth, at this point in your life.

  A UNIQUE LOOK AT YOUR LIFE

  The starting point to your sacred quest is understanding that the universe and our participation in it are not haphazard things.

  Intelligence flows through everything in the universe, and has had many names. It causes the planets to orbit, the galaxies to stay in place, the seedlings to sprout, the flowers to open and you, yes you, to breathe and walk and think.

  This invisible intelligence is in everything and it is everywhere. You cannot hold it or see it or smell it. But you know that it is there.

  Outer energy, which controls matter and the physical world, is finite. This means that there is only so much oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. There is nowhere to go for more of these when we run out of them. All of the physical trace elements, identified by scientists and studied by schoolchildren everywhere on the planet, are finite.

  Everything in our manifested world is made of these elements that exist in a finite amount. I like to think of all of our physical material as continually being recycled. Since we only have so much of this “stuff,” it must constantly be put back into use when it changes from one “thing” to another “thing.”

  The drop of iron that is in your blood today is a part of the total iron supply. Obviously it was someplace else before you were conceived. Fifteen million years ago it might have been part of an iron ore deposit in Afghanistan. Today it is part of the outer energy that is you.

  And so it is with all of the physical particles in the universe. A finite supply, continually being recycled. Material particles in one form, going back into the earth, and recycled as something else. Like one particle of magnesium from a sword showing up later in the femur of a panther.

  Emily Dickinson wrote a stanza, “The Single Hound,” describing this phenomenon. It is far more alluring than any prose I might use to make this point.

  This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies,

  And lads and girls;

  Was laughter and ability and sighing,

  And frocks and curls.

  This passive place a summer’s nimble mansion,

  Where bloom and bees

  Fulfill’d their oriental circuit,

  Then ceased, like these.

  The physical you that we can see and touch is made up of the same stuff that everything else is made of. Yet you are different than the things outside of yourself. To comprehend this, consider the four categories describing the manifested world: mineral, vegetable, animal and human. If we were to take a sample from each of these categories, pulverize them and put the powder into separate containers for lab analysis, the report would show no discernible differences. The mineral, vegetable, animal and human samples all comprise the same raw materials. Yet all of these samples differ from one another in an invisible, beyond-the-physical manner.

  The differences, however, are not in the physical makeup of things. The differences are in what we will call awareness. Each category has a different level of awareness:

  Mineral. The mineral world includes all of the things that you see around you. To the unfocused eye they just lie around and do nothing. You can look at a rock and it will not do a thing, even if you stare at it forever. So we say that minerals, while made of the same physical matter as we are, have very little awareness. (I say “very little” because to a quantum scientist who studies things at the subatomic level and thinks in terms of billions of light-years, minerals are fascinating. When examined at the subatomic level they are alive, dancing and changing endlessly.)

  Vegetable. The vegetable kingdom is made up of the same physical elements as the mineral would, but it has a much different level of awareness. The vegetable energy reproduces, bears fruit, stretches toward sunlight and protects itself from invaders. Somehow the organizing intelligence has taken the same elements and put them together to create a product that has more awareness than minerals.

  Animal. Once again, all animals are made of the same elements as minerals and vegetables, yet their awareness level is greater than the vegetables and the min
erals. Here we see mating, planning for the future, teaching the young, migrating and a wide variety of further examples of higher awareness. The organizing intelligence has taken the same trace elements and created creatures with higher levels of awareness.

  Human. We too are made up of the same physical trace elements as the other categories, but we have even higher levels of awareness. We can do many of the things that the other categories can, and we can do more.

  We have the power to make contact with the organizing intelligence and to create a life of bliss. We can know the divine organizing intelligence that is a part of us, even though it has been dormant for as long as we remember.

  You know very well that there are major differences among these categories, and these differences have nothing to do with the physical world. Indeed, this is an intelligent system that you are a part of, and that means that your life on this planet is a part of that intelligence.

  If the system is intelligent, and that intelligence is invisible, and our presence here is a part of that intelligence, we will never be able to discern what it is all about by using instruments that exist solely in the physical world. We need to look at that part of ourselves which is invisible. We will need to make direct contact with that part which I call awareness.

  You need to begin looking inward at who you are and why you are here instead of outward at the physical world and things within it.