Real Magic
Creating Miracles in Everyday Life
Wayne W. Dyer
DEDICATION
To our own spiritual miracle who showed up as our daughter against all odds, and is pure bliss in action, Saje Eykis Irene Dyer.
And to my two very special friends:
Deepak Chopra, M.D., my spiritual brother who links arms with me in love as we bring our limitless vision to the world.
Michael Jackson, whose words, music, and love remind us that it is only through giving that we are saving our own lives.
I love you all!
EPIGRAPH
What if you slept?
And what if,
in your sleep
you dreamed?
And what if,
in your dream,
you went to heaven
and there plucked
a strange and
beautiful flower?
And what if,
when you awoke,
you had the flower
in your hand?
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
PART I
CREATING AN INNER PATH FOR REAL MAGIC
1 A TRANSCENDENT VIEW OF MAGIC AND MIRACLES
2 BECOMING A SPIRITUAL BEING
3 CREATING A MIRACLE MIND-SET
PART II
APPLYING REAL-MAGIC AWARENESS IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE
4 REAL MAGIC AND YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
5 REAL MAGIC AND YOUR PROSPERITY
6 REAL MAGIC AND YOUR PERSONAL IDENTITY
7 REAL MAGIC AND YOUR PHYSICAL HEALTH
PART III
RADIATING REAL MAGIC TO THE WORLD
8 REAL MAGIC AND THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION
SEARCHABLE TERMS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY WAYNE W. DYER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about miracles. It is not a book about other people’s miracles, but about you, the reader, and how you can create miracles for yourself in your own life. It is not about luck nor is it about being one of a chosen few who have had miracles show up in their lives. This book was written with the express purpose of showing you the way to create what you may have previously thought to be impossible in your life.
This is a very personal book. I have seen the way to real magic in my own life and I have taken great care to detail what I believe to be the essential ingredients for creating a life filled with miracles. I have gone beyond “believing” in miracles, to a place that I call “knowing.”
“Knowing” in this sense is something we all have experienced. For instance, if I stay away from my bicycle for several months, I become aware of my knowingness of riding when I next go for a bicycle ride. I pump up the tires and off I go, balancing myself perfectly on those thin wheels and moving effortlessly through the streets, riding “no-handed” with full confidence, turning corners sharply and generally maneuvering my way through the streets with complete abandon. When I get on my bicycle, I do not have a goal of being able to balance myself again after all those months, I do not have a belief I can ride it, I have an internal knowing, and I proceed to act based upon that powerful knowing.
I feel the very same way about your ability to manifest miracles in your life. You can learn to go way beyond believing and goal setting, to a new place within yourself: the place of knowing. It is in this realm of your mind that miracles are produced.
Deep within you is a unified field of limitless possibilities. When you become competent at going to this wondrous place you will discover an entirely new realm of human experience where all things are possible. It is here that real magic takes place and you can begin to manifest all you seek in your physical world. Limits simply do not exist, and you seem always to be at the right place at precisely the right time. It is here that you make synchronistic “unbelievable” connections with others and can almost read the thoughts of those around you. It is here that you are capable of meeting exactly the right person to help you on your own personal path at exactly the right time. It is here that whatever or whoever is necessary to create prosperity and abundance in your life appears. It is here that the precise cure for your ailments shows up, or the right book or tape arrives into your life as if guided to you by some invisible, mysterious force.
In this place of higher awareness, the mystery begins to disappear and your purpose in life becomes very clear to you. Your relationships miraculously shift to new levels of spiritual partnership. Your business endeavors begin to “flow” and you start to make decisions with less and less effort. You begin to rid yourself of toxins and get your physical life on a healthy rather than a disease plane.
This book is my effort to show you how to go about creating this higher level of awareness. I have written what I consider a blueprint to assist you in developing this awareness and applying it to all aspects of your life, including your personal relationships and your relationship to the larger world.
The plan of nature seems to be nothing more than a slow and steady unfoldment of consciousness. A stone is alive with atoms, just like you are, but it has no perceptible awareness. It is immune to feeling kicked or pulverized. It appears to be unaware. A plant is aware of the conditions of the soil, the seasons and the humidity, and it will bloom with the spring sunlight. It is aware but very limited.
Animals, when compared with minerals and vegetables, have more developed levels of awareness. Many animals exhibit an awareness of the seasons in their ability to migrate, of danger in their ability to elude predators, and of deep caring and love in relationships with their mates and their young.
And then there are humans, who have the ultimate awareness of choice. We can choose to function at a lower level of awareness and simply exist, caring for our possessions, eating, drinking, sleeping and managing in the world as pawns of the elements, or we can soar to new and higher levels of awareness allowing ourselves to transcend our environment and literally create a world of our own—a world of real magic. Within each of us is the ultimate awareness offering a certain kind of victory over the material world: the capability of finding equilibrium in every set of circumstances. The lesson of this book is very simple—you are capable of achieving perfect equilibrium of the mind. The path requires a commitment to your own inner transformation.
Your inner transformation cannot be completed from an intellectual or scientific perspective. Instruments of limitation will not reveal the limitless. This is a job for your mind and your soul, the invisible segment of you that is always there but often ignored in favor of that which you can grasp with your senses.
The first part of this book provides the foundation for realigning yourself in the invisible world. It is here that you will gain mastery over your mind and set the stage for manifesting miracles in that highest stage of awareness which is yours for the knowing. Once you have learned to realign yourself, you begin the process of experimenting with this new miracle mind-set and watching with awe as your world begins falling into perfect order.
The second part of this book focuses on putting into practice that which you have committed yourself to in your mind. It guides you in the actual manifestation of miracles, and in living your daily life at the highest state of equilibrium. Here I have concluded each chapter with a section on specific suggestions for accessing miracles in your life.
During the early years of the U.S. space program Wernher von Braun encouraged Space Center employees to know that “there is perfect order in the universe. Mankind and mankind alone can understand that order.” This thought was a powerful stimulus when problems seemed
insurmountable. You, as a part of mankind, can understand this perfect order and actually choose to align yourself with it. This is the context of Real Magic. I know about that perfect order and I want you to experience it too.
The way to understanding is through your willingness to reach your own highest state of awareness, using that awareness to get your life on purpose, and radiating that awareness to everyone in your life. It is primarily a mental trip so powerful that it can affect the material world with its miraculous magical powers. But you must be willing to go within and discover it for yourself. My words will not make it true. Only experiencing what I am writing about will make it your reality.
This invisible mental trip involves dispelling some powerful misperceptions and arriving at a new set of knowings. With your new awareness you will shift from
• Knowing you are limited to knowing that ultimate reality and your own potential are unlimited.
• Knowing you are controlled by heredity, the environment and supernatural forces to knowing you create your own reality and that inborn and divine forces work with you rather than independently of you.
• Knowing knowledge and experience are available exclusively through your five senses to knowing that an intuitive, invisible guidance is available to you when you reach a higher state of awareness.
• Knowing human existence is dangerous and evil to knowing all experience is blessed and for a greater good.
• Knowing some people are luckier than others to knowing you can create your own luck and that all experience contains a valuable lesson.
• Knowing life is chaotic to knowing there is order in chaos and there are no accidents in a universe that is in perfect order.
I know the things I have written about in this book will be shocking to some and rejected by many. So be it. They are truth as I live it and they come from my heart. I know there is divine order in this universe, from the tiniest cell to the entire galaxy and beyond. That magnificent awareness is our birthright, and it is a part of each and every one of us.
Take these ideas and make them work, first in your own life, then with your immediate family and circle of acquaintances, and ultimately with the entire world. Once you discover the capacity for real magic within you, you will want to share this knowing with others and empower the entire world with this awareness. I trust this book will be helpful in this endeavor. It has been a joy to write about. I wish you the same real magic in your life. God bless you.
PART I
CREATING AN INNER PATH FOR REAL MAGIC
1
A TRANSCENDENT VIEW OF MAGIC AND MIRACLES
I have been all things unholy; if God can work through me, he can work through anyone.
—ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
According to the illustrious magician Harry Houdini, magic is achieved through illusion. A simple example is an illusion created by using smoke and mirrors. The illusion is called magic simply because it appears to be unexplainable. Late in his career, though, Houdini alluded to something that he experienced which he called “real magic.” He apparently had acquired the ability to produce results that were in fact unexplainable. These magical results could not be accounted for even as the product of illusion.
I chose the title of this book because I became attracted to the paradox inherent in those two words, real magic. You, like most people, are probably convinced that if something is real it cannot be magic, and if it is magic it cannot be real. However, it is my belief that when we get caught in this paradox we are inhibited from experiencing our magical dimensions. I believe that we experience real magic when we transcend the paradox and that the transcendent view encompasses the experience of real magic as indeed very real, and also magical.
In the past several years my life has undergone a magnificent transformation. I find myself on a path leading to levels of awareness and results that I can only describe as miraculous. They are simply unexplainable in any other terms. I am convinced that there is another realm to experience when we are ready to go beyond this life to which we have become accustomed. This other realm defies our laws of science and logic. It is a place within each of us that is free of ordinary boundaries, rules and limitations. This is not some wonderland that is available only in imagination. It is magically real and available to each person when he or she is ready.
I cannot explain how or why I have arrived at this place in my life. I am surprised I am talking about it! It simply feels as if experiencing and writing about real magic is my purpose or mission at this time in my life. Regardless of explanations, I find that I am filled with awe and respect for this unexpected part of my life path.
I am intrigued with Leo Tolstoy, in part because of what I see as parallels between his life and mine. He was a famous author during his lifetime and a man who had spent much of his life in hedonistic pursuits, one who had no spiritual bent in his early writings but witnessed in his own life a shift that seemed to be happening to him without his consent. His writing began to reflect a spiritual quality, and he wrote of the journey of the soul and the world of real magic. Yet he was uncertain about why or how this transformation had taken place.
Recently a copy of a handwritten portion of Tolstoy’s will, written by him twenty years before his death, was given to me by a woman who is one of the world’s leading experts on Russian literature. In this will Tolstoy described how he felt about his life’s work, which is precisely how I feel as I contemplate my own:
Furthermore, and in particular, I ask all people near and far not to praise me. (I know they will do so because they have done so in my lifetime in the most unseemly way.) But if they want to study my writings, let them look carefully at those passages in them in which I know the power of God spoke through me, and make use of them for their own lives. There have been times when I felt I was becoming the bearer of God’s will. I have often been so impure, so full of personal passions, that the light of this truth has been obscured by my own darkness, but nevertheless this truth has sometimes passed through me, and these have been the happiest moments of my life. God grant that these truths should not have been defiled in passing through me, and that people might feed on them, despite the superficial and impure form which I have given them.
And so too this unexpected turn that my own life has taken has occurred almost without my consent. I had no grand plan. I had no such goals or objectives for my life. What I did have was a willingness, an openness to seeing things another way. Now that I have been a witness to miracles in my own personal life, I feel compelled to share this new magical awareness. Perhaps you have been drawn to this book by the same natural flow of life that has motivated me to write about real magic.
THREE PATHS TOWARD ENLIGHTENMENT
As I look back at the entire tapestry of my life I can see from the perspective of the present moment that every aspect of my life was necessary and perfect. Each step led eventually to a higher place, even though these steps often felt like obstacles or painful experiences. Every successful, truly happy person that I have encountered has confirmed their knowing that there simply are no accidents. They see the universe as all-purposeful, including the so-called accidents. All agree that every unique happening in our lives leads us to a higher place. As Henry Miller said, “The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”
Begin right now to reconsider your entire life experience as a beautiful tapestry or journey toward greater awareness. A simple way to do this is to envision your life as a journey with three ascending paths.
1. ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH SUFFERING On the first path of your journey, you learn through a process I call enlightenment through suffering. At this time of life, which has nothing to do with chronological age, you ask, “Why me?” when something occurs that is painful or difficult. If it involves, for instance, the unwanted breakup of a relationship, you spend your present moments suffering and wondering how and why such a disaster could have befallen
you. After a while, as you recover, you are able to look back and say, “Now I know why I had to go through that breakup,” and you see, with the benefit of hindsight and suffering, that it allowed you to move on to another life experience of great value. From the perspective of looking backward, you realize that you had to experience the pain in order to transcend it.
This is the pattern of growth for many people: events occur, suffering takes place, and then the light appears. These events can happen in virtually all areas of one’s life: addictions, bankruptcies, illnesses, spiritual emptiness, layoffs, tax problems and anything in between. The experience is one of learning through hindsight by repeating this pattern of suffering over and over. Some people continue this cycle throughout their entire lifetime. They never move up from the first path and never experience the higher ground of enlightenment. They literally spend their lives suffering and then, a long time down the road, they may or may not see that an event was necessary and that it was a test for them at the time. They never seem to get the message that life gives exams and unless you learn from your mistakes you are doomed to repeat them. For some, life is spent in asking, “Why me, God? Why is this happening to me?” For persons in this category, real magic remains unavailable.
2. ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH OUTCOME If you recognize the first path as a pattern in your own life, then you probably have moved past suffering as your means to learning, to enlightenment through outcome. At this level you learn to stop asking, “Why me, God?” You develop a knowing that says, “There are no accidents, everything I am experiencing is in some way necessary for me to move ahead to the next step.” Rather than asking the “Why me?” question, you begin to ask, “What is in this experience that I can use in a beneficial way, even if I don’t understand why it is happening right now?”
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