Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want

I am aware that entering this realm of manifesting is like walking down an unfamiliar path. When you decide to enter the unknown, you obviously cannot know for sure what is ahead. I ask you, therefore, to avoid cluttering this path with preconceptions. Make an effort to read these principles and begin to apply them in your daily life, without judging them based on what you have been conditioned to believe about yourself as a person who is “only human” and, therefore, limited. Preconceptions will only serve to contaminate your unlimited potential for manifesting your heart’s desire. What you desire is of central importance, though you may never before have thought of desire and higher spiritual awareness as compatible concepts.

It is impossible to imagine a world without desire. To create is to desire. Even the wish to be desireless is a desire. The process of creating anything begins first with a desire. Your desires, cultivated as seeds of potential on the path of spiritual awareness, can blossom in the form of the freedom to have these desires in peace and harmony with your world.

Giving yourself permission to explore this path is allowing yourself the freedom to use your mind to create the precise material world that matches your inner world. That inner world is the one which is the catalyst for determining your physical world experiences. You will have to abandon the idea that you are powerless over the circumstances of your life. You will need to shift out of the group mentality that says you are incapable of manifesting. Group thinking inhibits your natural abilities to co-create your life as you desire it to be.

Examine the pressures and beliefs you have bought into, which reflect the thinking of your immediate family, your extended family, your community, your religious grouping, your ethnic grouping, your educational/business grouping or any of a multitude of specialized units of people. Determine the areas of your life that are jammed up with the teachings of those mind-sets, causing your personal evolution to be slowed down because what you truly desire or believe is not getting any energy from your unique individuality.

When you stay plugged into group consciousness, you are really saying, “I choose to evolve slowly.” Furthermore, that mind-set always gives you permission to be weak and impotent. You choose to evolve with a group rather than spontaneously, as your inner consciousness dictates.

If you truly understand the ability to manifest, you realize you can control the speed at which change occurs in your life. A practicing mystic will manifest quickly because he or she is plugged into the world behind his or her own eyes rather than seeing the world as dictated by the eyes of the group and all of its forebears.

As you experience unplugging your circuits from those external forces, you will see the speed of your evolvement increase drastically. If you hear a voice behind your eyeballs that says, “Move forward,” you no longer wait for everyone else to make a move forward before you take your first step. You no longer have to run your suggestions through the group mind, which is meant to keep you safe and to discourage your individuality.

I was able to begin my journey of enlightenment only when I fully recognized that the group agreement to keep me safe, and to love me inadequately, allowed me to seek something of a greater measure. If you wait for everyone else to learn how to manifest their hearts’ desires, you will not have enough time in this lifetime to even begin your journey. You must unplug from your conditioning and know in that private space behind your eyes that you can and will take on the challenge of manifesting your destiny.

When you cultivate the inner conviction to manifest from the world of the unseen into the material world, you understand that there is a universal God force that is in all things in the universe. There is not a separate God for each individual, each plant, each animal, each mineral. They are all one. Therefore, the same God force that is within you and causes you to think and breathe is simultaneously in everyone and everything else as well. It is universal. Thus, there is no place that it is not. Consequently, that which you perceive to be missing from your life also contains the same God force or universal intelligence that is within you.

Manifesting, then, becomes the business of doing nothing more than bringing into form a new aspect of yourself. You are not creating something from nothing. You are learning to align yourself with an aspect of your being that your senses have not known they could activate. This is a very important part of this understanding. You and that which you want to manifest into your life are one!

As I wrote this book, I had the most peaceful experience of writing that I have ever enjoyed. What you now hold in your hands is the result of these nine principles. Each day I would do precisely what I have written about in these nine principles.

As I practiced the nine principles, I realized that I was manifesting a handbook for spiritual manifesting that anyone could pick up and begin to apply in the very moments that they were reading the words in this book. I knew that I did not need to fill this book with hundreds of examples of these principles and how they had worked for me and many of my students as well as readers around the world. I knew that it was unnecessary to include a large number of quotes and affirmations as I have done in many of my previous books. This was to be something quite different.

The key word I kept in mind as I wrote and allowed these principles to manifest through me was the word “tight.” That meant to me, no extraneous verbiage, no case studies and a minimum of quotations. I was dedicated to a style of writing that I characterized as “Say what you want to say. Say it simply. Say it directly. Say it from your heart and resist any temptation to overwrite.” This is what I did in producing this book.

There are no chapters, simply nine principles. Each principle is explained in as straightforward a manner as I know how. Each came directly from my heart and not my head. I listened to my own guidance, and then I wrote it out. When I felt that I had said what was needed to be said, and when I had provided specific suggestions for implementing these principles, I stopped. You are holding in your hand the “tightest” handbook I know how to devise to teach the fundamental principles for spiritual manifestation.

My internal knowing is that when you practice these nine principles you will be given guidance. You will not be alone on this journey, and you will see your desires manifest as your destiny in your daily life.

Finally, you will know that your job is to say “Yes!” rather than “How?” I send you all green lights.

WAYNE W. DYER

BECOMING AWARE OF YOUR HIGHEST SELF (#ulink_a8ea0e0c-a5c5-564f-a52d-295de730da0b)

The First Principle (#ulink_a8ea0e0c-a5c5-564f-a52d-295de730da0b)

Within you is a divine capacity to manifest and attract all that you need or desire. This is such a powerful statement that I suggest you reread and savor it before you begin this journey.

Most of what we are taught to believe about our reality conflicts with this statement. However, I know it to be so true and valuable that I encourage you to surrender any hesitation and let this thought enter your consciousness: I have a divine ability to manifest and attract what I need or desire!

Becoming aware of your highest self does not happen through physical effort, nor can one rely upon supernatural techniques such as invoking angels to do this heavenly work for you. What is essential is that you learn that you are both a physical body in a material world, and a non-physical being who can gain access to a higher level. That higher level is within you and is reached through the stages of adult development.

The developmental stages of infancy through adolescence have been explored by many writers, but very little has been written about the developmental stages of adulthood. There are four stages that each of us seem to traverse once we reach adulthood. These stages of our lives represent a way of thinking, although they are not necessarily associated with age or experience. Some of us proceed rapidly through these stages, learning at a young age that we are both a physical self and a higher self. Others remain in one of the earlier stages for a lifetime.

Carl Jung, writing in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, provided some critical insight into the developmental tasks of adulthood. He believed that an awareness of a higher self is a developmental task of adulthood. In the next section I am offering my interpretation of Dr. Jung’s stages of adult development.

I write about these stages with some degree of expertise because I have spent many years in each of them. They have been stepping stones to my awareness of my higher self. Each stage involved experiences that permitted me to move ahead in my thinking and my awareness. Ultimately, I reached the level at which I could use these nine principles to co-create my life. That is, to manifest my own destiny.

As you read these, examine the personal and unique stages of your adult development that parallel Dr. Jung’s archetypes. Your objective is to become aware of your highest self as a dimension of your being that transcends the limitations of the physical world.

THE FOUR STAGES OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT

THE ATHLETE

The word “athlete” is not meant to disparage athletes or athletic behavior. It is intended as a description of the time in our adult lives when our primary identification is with our physical body and how it functions in our everyday world. This is the time when we measure our worth and our happiness by our physical appearance and abilities.

Those abilities are multitudinous and uniquely personal. They can include such things as how fast we run, how far we throw a ball, how high we can jump and the size of our muscles. We judge the worthiness of our physical appearance by a standard of attractiveness based on the shape, size, color and texture of body parts, hair and complexion. In a consumer culture like ours, judgment even extends to the appearance of our automobiles, houses and clothes.

These are the concerns one has when he or she is in the earliest stage of adult development. This is the time when life seems impossible without a mirror and a steady stream of approval to make us feel secure. The stage of the athlete is the time in our adult development when we are almost completely identified with our performance, attractiveness and achievements.

Many people outgrow the stage of the athlete and make other considerations more significant. Some of us, depending on our personal circumstances, move in and out of this stage. A few stay in the athlete stage for their entire lives.

Whether or not you have moved beyond the athlete stage is determined by how fixated you are on your body as your primary source of self-identification. Obviously, it is healthy to take good care of your body by treating it kindly and exercising and nourishing it in the best way your circumstances allow. Having pride in your physical appearance and enjoying compliments does not mean you are body-fixated. However, if your daily activities revolve around a predetermined standard of performance and appearance, you are in the stage that I am calling “the athlete.”

This is not a stage in which you can practice the art of manifesting. To reach the ability to know and use your divine inner energy, you must move beyond your identification as being exclusively a physical body.

THE WARRIOR

When we leave the athlete stage behind, we generally enter the stage of the warrior. This is the time when the ego dominates our lives and we feel compelled to conquer the world to demonstrate our superiority. My definition of ego is the idea that we have of ourselves as important and separate from everyone else. This can be an acronym for Earth Guide Only since ego represents our exclusive identification with our physical selves in our material world.

The ego-driven warrior objective is to subdue and defeat others in a race for the number-one spot. During this stage we are busy with goals and achievements in competition with others. This ego-dominated stage is full of anxiety and endless comparison of our success. Trophies, awards, titles and the accumulation of material objects record our achievements. The warrior is intensely concerned with the future and who might be in his way or interfere with his status. He is motivated with slogans such as: “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?”; “Time is money, and money is everything”; “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”; “Life is a struggle”; “If I don’t get mine, someone else will.”

In the warrior stage, status and position in life are obsessions. Convincing others of our superiority is the theme of this other-centered time of life in which the ego is the director. This is the time when we are attempting to do what warriors do: conquer and claim the spoils of our battles for ourselves.

The test of whether you have left this stage is to examine what it is that is the driving force in your life. If the answer is conquering, defeating, acquiring, comparing and winning at all costs, then it is clear that you are still in the warrior stage. You can probably regularly shift in and out of the warrior stage as a way of effectively functioning in the marketplace. Only you can determine how intensely that attitude dominates your existence and drives your life. If you do live primarily at this level, you will be unable to become a manifester in the sense that I am describing.

THE STATESPERSON

The statesperson stage of life is the time when we have tamed our ego and shifted our awareness. In this stage we want to know what is important to the other person. Rather than obsessing over our quotas, we can ask what your quotas are with genuine interest. We have begun to know that our primary purpose is to give rather than to get. The statesperson is still an achiever and quite often athletic. However, the inner drive is to serve others.

Authentic freedom cannot be experienced until one learns to tame the ego and move out of self-absorption. When you find yourself upset, anxious or feeling off purpose, ask yourself how much of your emotional state has to do with your assessment of how you are being treated and perceived. When you can let go of your own thoughts about yourself and not think of yourself for a long period of time, that is when you are free.

Shifting out of the warrior stage and into the statesperson stage of life was an extremely freeing experience for me. Before I made the shift I had to consider all of my ego needs when I gave a public lecture. This meant worrisome thoughts about how I would be received and reviewed, whether people would want to purchase my books and tapes, or fears about losing my place and becoming embarrassed.

Then came a time when, without any concerted effort, I began to meditate before my lectures. During my meditation I would silently recite a mantra asking how I might serve. My speaking improved significantly when I shifted away from my ego and entered the stage of statesperson.

The statesperson stage of adulthood is about service and gratefulness for all that shows up in your life. At this level you are very close to your highest self. The primary force in your life is no longer the desire to be the most powerful and attractive or to dominate and conquer. You have entered the realm of inner peace. It is always in the service of others, regardless of what you do or what your interests are, that you find the bliss you are seeking.

One of the most touching stories I have ever heard is of Mother Teresa, who even in her eighties ministers to the downtrodden in the streets of Calcutta. A friend of mine in Phoenix was scheduled to do a radio interview with her. As they spoke before the interview, Pat said to her, “Mother Teresa, is there anything I can do to help you with your cause? Could I help you raise money or give you some publicity?”

Mother Teresa replied, “No, Pat, there is nothing that you need do. My cause is not about publicity, and it is not about money. It is about something much higher than that.”

Pat persisted, saying, “Isn’t there anything I can do for you? I feel so helpless.”

Mother Teresa’s response was, “If you really want to do something, Pat, tomorrow morning get up at four A.M. and go out on the streets of Phoenix. Find someone living there who believes that he is alone, and convince him that he is not. That is what you can do.” This is a true statesperson, giving of herself each and every day.

When we help others to know that they are not alone, that they too have a divine spirit within them regardless of the circumstances of their lives, we move to a higher self that provides us with a sense of peace and purpose unavailable in the athlete and warrior experiences. It is here that we might recall the words of Mother Teresa: “I see Jesus Christ every day in all of his distressing disguises.”