On November 10th, Elle and I had the opportunity to attend a lecture given by self-help guru, Dr. Wayne Dyer. I had first come across his teachings is “The Power of Intention” about 2 years ago.
It was during the winter of my discontent when I had just returned to the US from Australia. During my sub-equatorial sojourn my dissatisfaction with life, the universe, work, myseslf, pretty much everything had festered into a black buboe.
As Emmylou Harris says:
The the they don’t tell you about the blues when you got ‘em / is you keep on fallin, for their ain’t no bottom, there ain’t no end /
I think that the program that started the dig-out from the hole I’d dug was that program. Don’t get me wrong, it took many more days and weeks with stumbles and regresses to extricate myself from the bounds I’d fashioned for myself, but I ultimately made the slog out.
As I worked, assembling Ikea bookshelves and listening to “The Power of Attention” I understood, primally, cellularly, how to start the change.
Success, like depression, like the exhilitory thrill of solving a Sudoku, is a spiral: an exponential exploration. One seed can feed 1 to the power of two, three, four…n in success. Depression works in the reverse, taking half over half over half until you’ve nothing left save the half idea of the possibility of a starting point. Dyer’s presentation jumpstarted by infenitesimal grain of progress and my being knew it through and through.
My cells told me to contribute to KQED (see entries: ) and I did. A year later I renewed my support and that seems to have put my name on an invite list and. In early October I was invited to attend the taping of the follow up to “The Power of Attention” on living an inspired life.
It sems to me, now that I reflect upon the content of “The Power of Attention” centers on helping the listener realize an essential truth of enlightenment: You are a carrier of a divine spirit: indestructible, powerful, beautiful, and whole. This connection can never be severed, but the connection can become rusted, corroded, and the satellite can forget his binding to the source.
Dyer rarely goes into the religious connotations by calling The Source, God, but if you’re of a particular religious persuation, he seems to have no problem with you attributing the properties of “The Source” to that divine identity.
Living a life connected, and aware of the connection to Source, is living the life in spirit that is to say the inspired life. This presentation, to begin airing in January 2006, speas of six benefits of living the inspired life. I’ll not list them here, despite having scribbled them in my Moleskine because I want to help preserve the PBS revenue stream and I think that Dr. Dyer’s delivery is much more lively and informative than much my scribbles.
The venue was that fanastic monument to San Francisco’s love of Art Deco, the Masonic auditorium on California Street. I hadn’t realized that it was California street’s broad avenue that had so impressed the designers of Grand Theft Auto: Sand Andreas that they mimiced is structure in the game play (although they never put the accurs’d San Francisco traffic - thankfully).
November 24th, 2005 at 4:07 am
Good to hear you made it out of your season of depression, those are quite crippling.
Regarding Dr. Wayne Dyer, I have tuned into a couple of his PBS shows and here are my thoughts on his teaching:
He is certainly a great communicator and teacher of his material, although he makes some claims and assertions that leave you with some apparent philosophical/logical contratidctions. Here are my thoughts and questions.
To not prescribe clear personal attributes to this thing he calls “The Source” is quite pointless considering all his teaching hinges around it. Meaning if you can’t define “The Source” how can you teach the fruit or the benefits of it. Steven, can you think of any real world analogies that parellel with this idea?
To me it appears his belief stems from a flavor of deism which is odd because deism acknowledges the existence of a divine source but states it is unknowable and doesn’t personally interact with the universe. So how can we benefit from it if we don’t know it or can’t interact with it?
Another thing that was odd was his metaphysical ideas. He has zero proof that thinking positively will create realities. But if they could to what limit do they have? For instance I can positively think that gravity shall halt when jumping off a cliff and we both know that won’t happen and it is absurd to think so. Positive thinking has no creative power in reality or in us.
Lastly, for him to be oaky with someone “attributing properties of “The Source” to any personal divine identity is defunct. Here’s why, a being is defined by what it is not what others think it is. For instance, I can apply attributes to you Steven that are in fact not consistent with who you really are. So, in common, it is not possible to just toss those attributes on any God without constradiction.
Being that you have a love for philosophy and logic Steven, please let me know if you see the same contradictions.
November 28th, 2005 at 11:27 am
Pardon my butting in, Shane, but it appears to me that your arguments—while philosophically well-grounded—fail to admit of the documented fact that perception does impact (not determine, but impact) reality. Various social sciences have observed that whether I believe I will be successful does affect my success. It doesn’t alter physical surroundings or anything, but we are surrounded as completely by perception as we are by reality—and we can only experience the former through the latter.