it it isn't too great a stretch for me to say that if everything that we needed for the physical Journey was handled for us in the moment of our spark of moving from non-being to being if everything that we needed in that tiny little infinitesimally small spark of life you could put a billion of them on the head of a pin that's how small it was that everything you needed there was a future pull in there and everything you needed for this physical Journey was handled there for you and look around you it was your
height your weight your eye color you know virtually everything about you as a physical being was handled for you there was nothing for you to do it's not that great a stretch for me to say that if everything that you needed for the physical Journey was handled that everything you needed for the rest of the journey was handled in there as well if you just keep your hands off of it if you just let it be the Beatles had it right let it be let it be let it be so in the process of uh
looking at this um this great teaching that I have been involved in for the past six months or so it's called know thyself and this is something that I have been reading studying looking at in an attempt to understand the highest Place Within Myself and I want to share a little bit about this with you here this evening in order to produce something that is greater than oneself one has to get out from oneself rise above oneself detach oneself and enter higher regions so as to capture elements from these regions there is a higher place
within yourself and this higher place I'm going to read just a little bit if you'll indulge me on this and then I'll lighten it up a little bit all right now some of this is going to sound a little weird but that's okay I just like to point it out so that you don't think I don't know that when it gets a little weird that I don't really realize that it is this is an Ancient Ancient teaching our higher self the place from which you originated in the new book The Shift I've divided it into
four chapters from is the first chapter ambition is the second chapter two is the third and meaning is the fourth which is the original title of the movie the shift and I'm speaking here about from like where we originate from where we come from our higher self which is where you originated you came from God you came from Source everything did there's no question about that anywhere even quantum physics teaches us this that it is energy itself which has formless which originates everything so our highest self is perfect there's a part of you that is
perfect now listen to this omniscient which means means knows everything there's a piece of you I admit it's a very small piece and hopefully my piece is just a little bit larger otherwise I should be sitting down and listening to what you have to say but I've studied this and practiced this and I really believe that there is a part of me that knows everything and Almighty a fragment of God himself a pure pure transparent luminous quintessence is how it is put so this highest place within yourself this like it was non-being nonbeing non-being nonbeing
and then in one Split Second it went to being and there was a spark a spark of God that was you and this spark of God that was you got lost when we when we made these this shift like the first moment of your conception that moment that you went from non-being to being you you think that it was it was was your parents who did this you know that you came from your parents but I'm speaking on a Quantum level here you didn't come from your parents if you took the tiny little spark that
began you and tried to find its origination point and reduced it down to its smallest tiniest fragment and ultimately put it into what we call a particle accelerator and revved it up as fast as you can rev it up and collided it and try to find out what was the basis what is the spark that began you what did it look like you open up that particle accelerator you look inside and there's nothing there you came from energy and then you were I mean you were in your parents womb your mother's womb for this nine
months and in those nine months of being inside of your mother's womb everything that you needed for the physical journey and for the entire Journey was taken care of it was all handled for you there was nothing for you to do in the da it says you're doing nothing you're just being done have you ever had that awareness you ever look in the mirror and realize that this has nothing to do with anything that you're doing you're just being done things start happening I go to shave now and I have to do my ears how
how does how for what I don't need hair there I need this is where I need it all right but it's and there's a part of you that just recognizes I mean you can lift them and you can shape them and you can put new things but you're not fooling anybody you know they're just what they are so in the first nineth nine months of your life everything was handled for you it says the da does nothing the da what is the da God the source it does nothing but it leaves nothing undone do less
achieve more stop interfering this is all out of the da live from that place within yourself and as you do that you begin to realize that the more you interfere with who you are and what you came here to do the less that you get done that's a very hard concept for us to grasp so let me continue with this so our higher self is perfect it's omniscient it's Almighty it's a fragment of God himself a pure transparent luminescence luminescent luminous quintessence now he says yes but if this is so how is it that this
self allows us to make mistakes if we have this perfect spark of God within us how come we make mistakes it is this that is so difficult to understand how can there be a being within us who sees and knows everything and is all powerful and yet who is totally unmoved who never feels or expresses any pain what's whatever we do why does he accept situations that are not in our best interest and when we speak to him our of our philosophy and our dreams and our hopes and our plans why does it do nothing
to put them into effect if God is within me if I am a piece of God we are not separated from him and yet when we are suffering and trying to improve the situation he remains is coldly indifferent and leaves us to our plight is there no way of touching him it is very important to get to know this higher self for he is so far above our own being that when he does decide to act nothing is impossible for him nothing and that's what I'm speaking about there is a knowing that I have within
me that there is a spark of God that if I can just move that spark from a from a SP spark to a fragment and from a fragment to a particle and from a particle just to a little piece and if I can get that to be just 1% of my being and know how to acknowledge it and to access it and to make it work for me in my life that everything that I need to know is there for me and anything that I want to accomplish and anyone that I want to meet and
anything that I want to happen is there because my higher self is perfect omniscient and all Mighty that's who you are and you've come to accept something much less than that and it is to this that I want to address this evening this talk so stay with me because it's going to get really good now so as as we have said he says everything is possible to our higher self the only problem is in getting him to act and we don't know how to make him do what we want it is a problem that can
reach tragic proportions in our lives how can we spark the Good Will of this being who is so far above us and whom we represent so inadequately here on Earth the only it only begins to notice us he says this higher self of yours I'm talking to God here you're all God you're what you came from the initiates teach that the only it only begins to notice us this higher part of us that can make anything happen and give us his attention is when we finally decide that we want to get to know it so
that's the first step making a decision to get to know this higher place within yourself and to overcome those things that I spoke about a little while ago that are uh um that are what you believe is true about yourself I was on the phone today with a dear friend talking to her for a long time and she was telling me all the reasons why people can't get themselves into maximum shape why they are overweight why they are tired and she kept going on and on and on with all of this stuff and the more
she would say these things to me the um the more I would just I was RA I was jumping through the phone trying to explain to her that I am not going to go in front of several thousand people tonight and talk to them about how to argue for your limitations and to argue for why you can't do what you do I said you're talking to somebody who in 29 years for 29 years of my life I ran eight miles every day and missed one day in 29 years it didn't make any difference how tired
I was it didn't make any difference where I was if I was on an airplane if I had 104 fever it didn't make any difference because I have within me an internal kind of a knowing that if I want to stay in the maximum shape for myself and Jorge Cruz taught me that just I had to re remind myself with his wonderful book the belly fat cure just get rid of the sugar and get off of your ass and do something [Applause] if you want the qualities of your higher self to flow down into your
lower self so you have this higher self you have this lower self the great teacher uh Viva Cananda came over to this country in the early part of the last century 1907 1908 he said um in the spring time go out and observe the blossoms on the fruit trees he said the blossoms vanish of themselves as the fruit grows so too will the lower self vanish as the Divine grows within you this is about letting the Divine grow within you this is about trusting your intuition this is about knowing that there is a force in
the universe that you have just got a rusted link to that you're going to clean the rust up from you're going to find the title of this talk is about moving your life from ambition to meaning you're going to find that meaning in your life I wrote in the shift this um where's my copy of the shift this was by Joel gold Goldsmith it was instrumental when I wrote this book this last year this is just it's the companion book to the movie then there are those he said who reach a stage in which they
realize the futility of this constant striving and struggling for the things that perish things which after they are obtained prove to be shadows it is at this stage that some persons turn from this seeking for things in the outer realm to a seeking for them from God I'm one of those people one of those people who was called by something called a passion and when you have that passion there is something that you can do you can activate this higher self within you and you can begin to create a current that flows between this higher
self and this lower self and when you do this lower self begins to disappear it's like thinking of it as like a container inside of you and this container has only only only what you want to create for yourself in it it that's all that's in there and so it's been filled with all of the things that you believe to be true I wrote a book about all of this just recently and did a PBS special on it called excuses be gone and all of these excuses all of these things that we've come to believe
are true about ourselves we find out that they don't hold any truth at all that if we really want to get rid of these things that we believe are true like it's going to take a long time it's going to be very difficult I'm too old I'm too young I'm too fat I'm uh you know it's it's uh you know I don't have enough energy all of these things I went through all of every one of those excuses and had you look at in the last portion of that book a paradigm for change beginning to
see that just because you believe that it is true don't believe everything that you think in fact don't believe hardly anything that you think because as you believe what you think you find out that it's not 100% guaranteed that it's true so you want to shift it but before I go into how to get that current flowing between the higher self and the lower self and then how to activate it and then into how to have your wishes fulfilled I want to bring someone up here on the stage um she has been with me well
she's been with me since uh she was born um she's now 28 years old almost and is getting married can you believe it in January um and her name is Sky um she is one of the angels in my life she's been singing she has her own CD which I want to show called you inspire me um she's sang on many of my PBS specials in fact on virtually all of them and I ask her to come here tonight and just sing a couple of songs to break it up and bring some beauty up here
on the stage so ladies and gentlemen I'd like to introduce to you my beautiful daughter singing from her CD you inspire me Sky Dyer I'll move that I want the whole stage oh you're gonna rearrange the stage is it is it the way you want it is it okay hello San Diego I'm so happy to be here tonight with all of you I'm going to sing two songs for you all tonight and the first song I'm going to sing is a song I wrote and this song came about because my dad had called me at
an ungodly early hour and said Sky I have an idea for you you're going to write a song and it's going to be called you inspire me and I'm also going to do a PBS special on inspiration so I said okay because you don't really say no to him he is the master so never mind that so the next day I sat at the piano and it came pretty pretty easy and I think that's because we can be inspired by so many things and I'm surrounded by inspiration I am taught by my dad and my
mom but here's the song and I hope you like it do you ever stop and think about your life and what it all means our lives are so full of Miracles I hope every person SE [Music] you have something inside that brings joy to your soul and makes your heart sing We all share the same big blue sky and the power to do anything you inspire me to be everything that I desire and everything I do is to be in touch with you and every day of my life I dream a little higher and it
all comes back to you and how you make me so inspired sometimes I feel that it's right in front of me me and I have to reach out strength comes from knowing that you need someone to help you out you inspire me to be everything that I desire and everything I do is to be in touch with you in every day of my life I dream a little higher and it all comes back to you and how you make me so [Music] inspired we all have a choice to feel the love deep within us the
freedom to hear our own voice and a chance to make our path in life a little clearer oh you inspire me to be everything that I desire and everything I do is to be in touch with you in every day of my life I dream a little higher and it all comes back to you and how you make me so inspired do you ever stop and think about your life thank you I'm going still thank you so much this next song I'm going to sing is a really special song to me and I learned of
this song because there was a picture uh that my older sister Tracy sent to my dad and it had some words below it and I never really paid attention but I learned later that there were lyrics to a song a great song called Leader of the Band by Dan Fogelberg and the song tells a story of a man who didn't die with his music in him he knew what his passion was and he knew what his purpose was in this life and This song reminds me of my dad because he's here to teach all of
us and Dad we are so grateful and thankful for you so this is for [Applause] you a lonely child alone and wild a cabinet maker son his hands were meant for different work but his heart was known to none he left his home and went his alone and solitary way he gave to me a gift I know I never canay a quiet man of Music denied a simpler fate he tried to be a soldier once but his music would he earned his love through discipline a thundering velvet hand his gentle means of sculpting Souls took
me years to understand the leader of the band is tired and his eyes are gr on but his blood runs through my instrument and his s is in Soul my life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man I'm just in living Legacy to the Le of the band my brother's lives were different for they heard another call one went to Chicago and the other to St Paul and I'm in Colorado when I'm not in some Hotel living out this life I chose and come to know so well I thank you for your music
and your story of the road I thank you for your when it came my time to go I thank you for your kindness and the times when you gotough and Papa I don't think I said I love you near [Music] enough the leader of the band is and his eyes are gr old but his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul my life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man I'm just living Legacy to the leader of the band I'm just a living Legacy to the Le of the
I am living Legacy to the leader of the band [Applause] thank [Applause] you good night my goodness h sorry just don't have kids if you don't want that to happen to you all thank you sky that was so beautiful you touched me so so so much I love that [Applause] song and thank you Tracy for that beautiful picture and the words you put under it that hangs in my office so proudly so I was speaking about the higher self and making access to the lower self and I want to share with you this one uh
one exercise that I learned that I have been practicing and that is very profound if you want the qualities of your higher self remember I'm speaking here now about God the God within you the almighty om ient person that you are the energy that is your Birthright but you have lost sight of because of your you're coming to believe things to be true which um only take you to plac that's called Ordinary if you want the qualities of your higher self to flow down into your lower self you're going to have to bring your imagination
into play now I'll be speaking in the last part of tonight's talk about the power of the imagination it's the greatest gift you've ever been given and everything that exists in the physical world once started in someone's imagination including you if you want the qualities of your higher self to flow down into this lower self where you can become this Almighty omniscient omnipotent being you're going to have to bring your imagination into play you are down here on Earth using your imagination you focus on your higher self in the world above and picture him looking
down at you in other words from that higher level you look down and see yourself and the imperfect conditions in which you live keeping this thought before you you set in motion a current an invisible current that flows between the self that is above and the self that is below in this way you are restoring the vital link between you for from down here you are thinking that you are up there and up there you are conscious that you are down here thinking of yourself up above it's very difficult to explain this clearly as you
can see at the same time you divide yourself you also unify yourself you divide yourself into two one above and one below the one above your true self watches the one below as he meditates on that self above and in this way an extraordinary current is established between the two making it possible for your superconscious to develop you stay with your eyes closed conscious at the same time that you are there in your room a living thinking being while your all powerful omniscient higher self above sees his reflection and recognizes himself in you seeing himself
he smiles at you perhaps even laughs a little and you watch from below and begin to get to know him while he watches you from above in this way the gulf between the higher and the lower poles of your being begin to narrow until one day it disappears and they are fused into one when this happens your lower self no longer exists that lower self the ego which is not a true reality disappears and all that is left is your real higher self no more weakness no more discouragement no more Darkness you become omniscient Immortal
and eternal now it sounds like well that's I'll just go ahead and do that and it's all going to just work out for me but what I'm really saying here is that it's an exercise that if you begin to practice it for about 30 minutes a day in your meditation and begin to Picture This higher part of you your origination place the spark of God that is you where you came from not just because I'm speaking from a spiritual perspective but I whoever the quantum physicists are that are watching and listening tonight whoever they are
as well they all know that it is an invisible field of energy from which all things originate to which all things return that is your essence it is your true self and if you can just get that higher self to become one or two or three% of who you are you can begin to access through your intuition the kinds of things that your false self doesn't allow muktananda called the ego the false self because in those first nine months of your existence from that spark of God that you were when everything that you needed for
this physical Journey was handled in there in this miraculous way that is just too profound and too mysterious for us even to begin to Fathom isn't it on my birthday on May the 10th this week I was uh invited to uh a very special uh showing of a movie that I'm in um and I didn't even know I was in it uh the movie is called Toy Story 3 which will be out on June the 18th and the movie that precedes the uh Toy Story 3 is a 4minute movie called day and night and um
I am one of the characters in day and night I gave a lecture in 1977 called how to be a No Limit person and um they took a piece of that out and the two characters this is an animated film and the two characters at Pixar Studios they were so nice to us my daughter uh Serena was with me and um and friends and and uh it was just a very very powerful day and uh they showed the film a couple of times and we had some three and four year olds with us and and
one character is day and one character is night and they're both afraid of each other day doesn't like night day doesn't understand night night night doesn't understand day why are things so bright why are things so dark why do you go to sleep why are you awake why and so on and there's these opposites which is what the physical world the material world looks like isn't it in the Bhagavad Gita it teaches us to fuse and meld these dichotomies bring them together into a Oneness which is where we originated from and if you read the
shift you'll read the first chapter it's called from and we came from Oneness and we came from nothing nothingness learning nothingness and Oneness while we're here in Tess is very difficult to even talk about let alone explain but the two characters come together and they're fighting each other throughout the whole thing and they don't understand each other and then this voice at the end of the film from a radio tower which is my voice says um something to the effect that everyone just wants to uh has a great fear of the unknown they only want
to do what they're familiar with which is what I've been speaking about here tonight you know that that we believe things to be true about ourselves and we just stay here and we don't know that the only way we can get here is through this higher higher part of ourselves through the god that we are and there's no blasphemy in this this is not this is not a religious talk it's a a no this is just a a scientific and spiritual truth and as I say to me the most beautiful things in all the universe
are the most mysterious they to poke each other kind of in the stomach and they join hands and off they go and that's the end of the movie and you never know if that was 1977 I was 37 years old I'm now 70 uh and it's going to be out there for you know Millions hundreds of millions of children to look at and see and participate in and it's the great mystery isn't it that's what the da teaches us live the mystery don't be afraid to wander into the unknown don't be afraid to to know
that this music that you came here to play is calling you it's begging you you can't you can't fulfill somebody else's Dharma you can't do it the way your family wants you to do it you can't do it the way uh you're they did it before you have to go within and know that this is my calling maslo taught me Abraham maslo taught me when I was a young doctoral student you must learn to be independent of the good opinion of other people you must learn to detach yourself from outcome that's what self-actualizing people do
those are the the two most important qualities Detachment from outcome you don't do what you do because of what you're going to make or how what kind of rewards you're going to get or or how people are going to like you you do what you do because it's your passion because you won't allow anything else to be but what you feel inside it's what I used to call being a scurvy elephant and you've heard me say it many times if you've listened to me over the years when I lived in a foster home and a
series of orphanages when I was a young boy I came home from school in the third grade and I said to Mrs scarf the lady who ran the place what's a scurvy elephant and she said I what I said I heard Mrs P telling the principal outside the classroom that Wayne Dyer was in her classroom and he was a scurvy elephant she got on the phone and she called the principal and the principal said oh that wasn't that's not what she said at all she said that he wasn't a scurvy elephant she said he was
a disturbing element in her classroom you have to be a disturbing element you have to go within find what it is that you know you want to do and not get to the end of your life like Ivan illich and say what if my whole life has been wrong what if it was wrong what if I didn't fulfill that thing that I know and when I get these callings now and there's no age limit on on this I mean you all see the words up there Hay House I mean it's all over the place Louise
Hay started this company when she was 61 years old she's now 84 83 or 84 years old and going just as strong as she ever did it was like there's just something inside some people that they have a calling and they have a knowing I'm just one of them this is just what I've always done refuse to let somebody else dictate what it is that I would be or could be or ought to be so when we were born the moment that we were born think about those first 9 months inside your mother's womb or
are there any pregnant ladies here tonight where are you any anybody nobody's doing it anymore what that Sky you sit down you're not married no cuz I wanted to give a well come up here I can't see you from here where are you there you are you're the only one bad girl I've written four children's books I'll have to give you oh here comes somebody else they're slowly coming up incredible you would you read that to your growing baby now like tonight start every day thank you and I'd like to give this to you come
on move what is the matter with you come on run up here would you read this to your baby your growing baby inside what a miracle can you believe what a Miracle's happening inside you do you think of that every night yeah I've got one for you too the Unstoppable me you're unstoppable you don't I want to see oh yeah there it is okay there you go one more here we go start reading tonight okay yeah because that growing little perfect being that great Misty thank you God bless you sweetheart congratulations um those perfect little
beings this great mystery there was nothing for there's nothing moms moms to be there's nothing for you to do what are you going to do get in there and say I'd like the eyes to be this color I'd like to change this around I don't think that there's nothing for you to do somehow the Divine organizing intelligence the god of which you are a piece a spark a fragment had a knowing about everything and how it ought to be and there was nothing for you to worry about there's nothing for you to do in the
recovery Movement we call this letting go and letting God don't we letting go and letting God I know I'm standing up here before you and uh in a few months I'll celebrate my 23rd year of not having any alcohol go through this body my friend Patty Davis President Reagan's daughter who was a cocaine addict wrote an essay in uh Newsweek magazine and we've become friends and we've communicated and her essay was brilliant because what she said is I tried to stop disappointing my father I stopped trying to dis I stopped uh trying to dis stop
disappointing my mother my family my friends and all of that she said that I was only able to get myself clean of this uh addiction when I decided that I no longer wanted to disappoint God that we come from a place of well-being we come from a place of perfection and when we allow 31% of our children to become obese and we we allow when we be allow our entire generation of people to have a shorter life EXP expectancy than their parents and when we get our whole population addicted to taking pills in order to
get through their days we need to return to the place from which we originated where none of that took place I have here in the audience tonight a friend who has become a lifesaver to me when the day that I was diagnosed with leukemia she happened quote to be outside my place on Maui waiting for me just wanted to meet me and uh because because she had been done doing an awful lot of work on uh on helping to transform People's Health and habits her name is Pam McDonald she's sitting right over there and Pam
uh has uh written a book that'll be out with Hay House coming up in October called the perfect gene diet and what she has done has gone within and looked at the genetic codes within each and every one of us and designed what she did is designed for me a diet and a program that was consistent with who I am genetically in my blood and um it's totally completely transformed my life she has a practice up in Danville um she's one of the most beautiful human beings that I've ever been around her name is Pam
McDonald and you look for her book in October the perfect gene diet it's going to transform some of those things that I talked about before thanks for being here Pam God bless you love you so this non-doing status that we were in we come in we're born into this world and we take on something called ambition and ambition is the time in our adult life or our CH our child's life when um we develop this what muktananda called The False self and most of us live our lives on the basis of this false self and
this false self is really an idea it's an idea that's called the ego you can't find it because it's the virtually the cause of all of our problems I mean I have a uh a quote at the uh the chapter on ambition um from ran Mahari he said all unhappiness is due to the ego with it comes all your troubles if you would deny the ego and Scorch it by ignoring it you would be free you would be free and that freedom from the ego is something that I have worked on in my life to
a point now where all I see anymore especially after studying the uh works that I've been reading from here tonight about knowing what it means to be an initiate and live from that higher self that what I see in every one that I encounter now is the unfolding of God I don't see separation I see a kind of thing that unifies Us in such a spectacular way and it's like it's one of the hardest things for us to get ego EG o edging God out EG o so we're born God the da Divine mind soul
Spirit whatever you call you can be an atheist and you still know that there is some kind of an invisible intelligence that allows things to be it's very hard for it's as hard for me to contemplate a watch without a watch maker as it is to contemplate a universe without a creator for me I just can't imagine a simple little thing like a watch existing without a watch maker and imagine the complexity of a universe which has trillions and trillions of uh of pieces to it without some kind of a creative force in the universe
whatever you want to call it the opening line of The Da to Ching says the da that can be named is not the da so the first time first thing you do when you put your name on something you've lost it when you're speaking from the higher self the place that moves from ordinary up to here because you've got the thing and you've got the name for it two separate things but we're talking about Oneness and we've reduced it to Tess it's like taking the concept of zero and trying to divide it and tell you
what half of zero looks like it's not possible zero doesn't allow for division does it nor does God or Soul or Spirit or higher Consciousness it doesn't allow for it so you were born and your parents looked at you and said great work God this is terrific we'll take over from here and in the process of taking over what was created in you which was created in them was this false self this identification of who I am as something that has these I'll go through them very very quickly because I want to get to something
I think even more important and I've talked about this a lot and it's in the shift and you'll see it in the film and but it's the components of this ego see I it isn't too great a stretch for me to say that if everything that we needed for the physical Journey was handled for us in the moment of our spark of moving from non-being to being if everything that we needed in that tiny little infinitesimally small spark of life you could put a billion of them on the head of a pin that's how small
it was that everything you needed there was a future pull in there and everything you needed for this physical Journey was handled there for you and look around you it was your height your weight your eye color you know virtually everything about you as a physical being was handled for you there was nothing for you to do it's not that great a stretch for me to say that if everything that you needed for the physical Journey was handled that everything you needed for the rest of the journey was handled in there as well if you
just keep your hands off of it if you just let it be the Beatles had it right let it be let it be let it be let it be there will come an answer Let It Be when I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary says to me whisper words of wisdom let it be let it be let it be just let it be just let it be but we don't we practice non-interference I talked about it on the PBS special for that I have a friend her name is Carrie she has two little
girls and she brought them over over for me to babysit and my grandson Carter was there so it was my grandson Carter four years old cile maybe 5 years old Kylie s years old and she was going off the shop and she said um could you watch the three children they're going to be at the pool I said I think I can handle that she said but I'm going to be gone for a couple of hours and these are all the things that you'll need to I said I don't need anything I'm fine yes but
they're going to fight and they're going to argue and I said no don't you don't have to worry about that I'm a d master I can handle this so she left and she said are you sure because you know I can take one of them with me and I can I said no I can handle I had eight kids I can handle this it's it's fine so within three minutes of her being gone kamile comes running over to me calls me uh Uncle Wayne Uncle Wayne Uncle Wayne you Carter Carter Carter he splashed me he
splashed me I put my hand up I said uh I'm a DST master I have absolutely no interest in what you're telling me splashing is a part of what happens when you're around the water it's going to happen probably some more but but you know five minutes later my grandson comes up he calls me bumpa Grandpa bumpa bumpa bumpa bumpa Miley Miley she she threw water at me she she just said I said Carter try to imagine how little I care I have absolutely no interest in this whatso but bumper bumper took about 10 minutes
and then for the then and then Kylie was going to come over and she came running up to me and she said and she looked at me and I she said he doesn't care and for the next two hours I had no problem non-interference Letting Go letting God allowing and somehow I know that the part of the Journey of towards Enlightenment it's really about honestly it's about letting go it's about doing less and accomplishing more it's about not struggling it's about you know in the in the DA they Lau speaks about water all the time
you know find your live like water it's the softest substance in the world and yet it's the strongest it stays low practice radical humility it goes from the high places all the way down to low why is the ocean the strongest force on the universe in our on our planet rather because it stays low it lets the streams and F Rivers fight and work and all but they all end up down here stay that way find God in nature all of these kinds of things I learned and practiced but the ego teaches us that who
we are is not this Divine being that if we let it go and just guided but stepped aside and allowed and when sky was singing those songs and said said Thank you when it came my time to go thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go who am I to tell my own children that they should do what I want them to do when I never did any of that my entire life and when she wanted to drop out of school and uh out of college at the University of Miami and
uh pursue singing and go she said Dad she said I just I just can't listen to one more lecture on Music Theater I want to sing I want to write my own music but she thought she was disappointing me if you knew how much the tuition was there you could know there was no there was no being upset about that at all no I'm kidding the uh the idea that I should be imposing or telling her what to do when Serena went and applied for law school and got in with with within a month or
so took the LSAT got a high score went over got herself accepted the law school and she was there for about three weeks and she said this is just something that I do not want to be doing and she had a knowing because I always knew that you not only have to experience what you don't want you have to experience what you do want and what you don't want you have to experience those things I spent four years in the military knowing that this is not what I wanted to be someone who took orders and
dressed just like everybody else there are other people who do these things but not for me and I understood that with her and she sent me a text message and I let it sit there for about six or seven hours and she she was so worried that I was going to be disappointed because I remember helping her write her uh her essay to get in I said you're not going to write the kind of essay that everybody else writes they want to get into law school we're going to write an essay that's going to knock
their socks off you know and she got accepted and she left and I said you leave with my blessing you do what you know that you have to do and the same with Tracy when she decided to leave and so on it's like practicing a kind of uh respect for a person's higher yourself that this little being khil jabran put it this way he said your children are not your children they are the products of life's longing for itself they come through you but not for you they come through you so the ego says who
you are and you were taught this every one of you in this room including myself we were taught this who you are is what you accumulate so accumulate more get as much stuff as you can the problem with what you accumulate is if that's how you identify who you are then when you no longer have what you've accumulated who you are has gone out the window as well and in a recession when people find themselves not having the stuff that they had before they find themselves depressed needing to take drugs anxious suicidal because they have
a false belief the ego is a false self you are not what you have the ego also says not only are what you have but you are what you do so you have to accomplish a lot so you go off to school and you set goals and you get good grades none of my children ever saw me ask them for the report cards their whole life it just wasn't a big deal to me you're going to school these are your grades this is your life I'm here to support you guide you you don't have to
get good grades because of me my daughter Summers called me the other day she said I'm going to make you so proud next May because I'm going to graduate from college and you never thought I would I said honey that won't make me proud at all I'm not interested in that whatsoever if you want to graduate from college it's your choice I'll be there and I love you but things that make me proud are who you are the being that you are you don't have to satisfy me or fulfill me in any way it's a
hard lesson but it's also one of I have eight children and I'm close to every one of them love every one of them and they love me I feel it and know it in my bones every day and it's because one of the reasons is that I do not live and fulfill my destiny and my Dharma through them any more than I expect them to do it through me I just don't go that way you are not what you have and you are not what you do the problem with what you do the da says
do nothing and get everything done let go allow the ego says I have to do more and there's a real irony in this it's very hard to explain this to people but you can get more done by doing less I had that's one of the the verses in the Dow that I worked on and worked on and I swim every day in the ocean every day usually an hour a day freestyle in the open ocean or I do it at the pool if I'm on the road and I decided to see if I could swim
by doing nothing just Propel myself through the water but take the effort out just let myself go through the water and do just allow just allow my body to move through the water the way it knows how to do and I stopped working at it and stopped trying I swam better faster less stress it's one of those amazing things I mean I I watch uh the really great athletes I watch a Michael Jordan and I don't think he's out there doing what he does because he's trying so hard it's like and people will say to
me well when you write or when you speak you make it look so easy it's because um I repeat before I get introduced for a talk like this I repeat a line from A Course in Miracles and this line says that uh if you knew who walked beside you at all times on this path that you have chosen you could never experience fear or doubt again and I just I don't deliver the talks God gives all the talks builds all the bridges writes all the books and I just allow it to flow through me and
some of you may be thinking yeah but you can't really live in today's world that way but I came of an orphanage and um have been able to amass a nice uh a nice life's work touching the lives of millions of people and having lots and lots of all the things that people want to come into their life show up to a place now where I don't even connect myself to it I just let it go the ego says not only are what you have and what you do but you're also what other people think
of you so these are the three main components that you learned about your false self you are what you have so you accumulate more you are what you do get a lot of achievements and you are what other people think of you be concerned about your reputation the da says you are not what you have have less give away all that you have one of the things I learned at the da I just gave everything away I had and now it's all back again and now I have to go through my closets all the time
and give clothes away to people who don't have clothes and uh give books away and and so on it just it's this it's this freeing notion that we came from nothing and we return to nothing so let nothingness silence the void let it become the guiding principle in your life the ego also taught us that we are separate from each other and separate from what's missing in our lives and separate from God there's a wonderful piece in here that I must share with you it says if this trend towards separation continues the situation will become
so terrible that men will end by Exterminating each other insteading instead of finding any Joy or pleasure in being together they will be overcome by such a sense of hostility at the sight of other human beings that they will Massacre each other just like that for no reason can you imagine this is why we are learning more and more how to love help and understand others so as to come closer and closer to the state of unity but the hardest thing in the world today is to try to convince human beings of this they simply
cannot get it into their heads you can get them to understand Electronics pure math mathematics but they cannot not understand this question of unity they cannot see the point of it initiates on the other hand seek nothing but this the path that leads back to the perfect Unity inwardly We Are One in our spirit we are all one but this Oneness has not yet been achieved on the physical plane it is this that remains to be achieved we just don't get it we just don't get that there is a Oneness the Native Americans had it
right right they said no tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves that we all originated in the same place we returned to the same place what I have been learning the last six months what I've been teaching this higher self is one that teaches about serving about giving about reverence for all of Life about Simplicity about G gentleness about nonviolence but essentially it's about seeing yourself in others and seeing others in yourself no matter who they are the lady who cleans my toilet at the hotel is just as Divine a being Mother
Teresa said in every day I see Jesus Christ in all of his distressing disguises that's the higher self at work as you begin to move to this place of serving giving off off offering rather than the inner Mantra of what's in it for me how much can I get as you begin to make that shift and we have to make this shift because now we're producing generations of kids who are going to live not as long as we do do we want that for our kids do we want to give them a food supply that
is contaminated do we want them to be addicted to taking pills for everything that they do in their life do we want a third of our children to be so inactive that they are that they're obese a third of them we have to shift that Consciousness and it has to take place within each and every one of us so the shift away from ego is to the place of meaning where you ultimately get yourself you know the course of Miracle says that this you live in an insane world and the breadth of that Insanity you
can't even begin to comprehend the only way that you can counteract It Is by moving to that higher place within yourself getting that current running between the highest place within you and the lowest place you are not what you have you are not what you do you are not what others think of you you are not separate from anyone you are not separate from What's missing in your life there is no place that this da is not that God is not if there's no place that it is not then it's in you and if there's
no place that it's not it is also in everything that you perceive to be missing from your life it's also in that all you have to do is realign yourself in such a way that you do what Einstein said he said when they asked him about quantum physics he said it's of no interest to me whatsoever it's just all details he said the only thing I want to do is to learn to think like God thinks how does the source of all things how does it think it is only giving it doesn't ask anything in
return listen to the great hafes the great Persian poet even after all this time the Sun never says to the Earth you owe me just think what a love like that can do it lights up the whole world that kind of a love that kind of a shift to the highest place within you you are God you are God that's not Blasphemous the god that most people in Western culture and Eastern culture represent is a god of the ego it's just like the ego it wants more it demands Revenge it plays favorites it wants to
have a opulence around it that's a god of the ego the God I'm speaking about the source that I'm speaking about is one that doesn't play favorites it's in everything and everyone and if there's there's a story told of a of a of an avatar a little boy who lived back in the 13th century and everybody in the village in Nepal knew that wherever he went he was like he was like God walking he would be seen at two places in the village at the same time he would be he would be of such a
countenance that his his presence would heal people they would just be healed just by being in his presence Christ Consciousness City Consciousness and the elders and the tribe got together and they said I'll give you an orange if you can tell us where God is and the little boy responded I will manifest two oranges if you can tell me where God isn't that there's no place that it is not this source of all is everywhere there's no place that it is not and if you know that then you're already connected to everything that you perceive
to be missing from your life you let go and return to that place of your origination and in that place of your origination you allowed it to take care of you rather than you interfering and taking care of it and in you in in the in the little book the shift I speak about in the opening chapter about this idea I call it your fress where you came from there was nothing for you to do and everything was taken care of seems like such a contrad well I've also invited somebody else here tonight that I
want to introduce you to and share a little bit about with you and you're going to be just astounded by this if you saw my public television special you saw him on my PBS special he has uh written since then a book his name is Dan Caro and Dan on his uh in his second year on St Patrick's Day in 1982 when he was two years of age he um was playing in a garage his mother was outside the garage and there was a uh a can of gasoline in the garage floor and a spark
from the water heater went off and ignited it and the whole place went up in flame including Dan and he was burned beyond recognition and told that he could never live and would never survive he's had 80 some surgeries he has No Hands his I've seen him in a bathing suit his has almost no feet his uh entire body has uh been grafted from just a little bit a few of the places that weren't burned and um he has lived his life having to face uh obstacles that most people would never even dream of when
I met him I found out that he was a musician not just a musician but a world- class musician he went to University down in Louisiana was a part of their band um is now his own practicing uh musician and I asked him to please write this book to which I wrote the forward um it's called The Gift of fire and I titled this book for him when he asked me what I thought the title should be because he speaks of what happened to him and what he had to go through not only as uh
as a struggle for him but as a gift so this is one of the great reads if you don't you buy anything else this weekend get get a copy of the gift of fire especially if you think you got troubles um it's just so beautifully written um I love it I love this man and he's going to talk to you a few minutes few for a few moments and he's even going to play the drums for you without any hands ladies and gentlemen my friend my buddy Danny Caro here he [Applause] is take it away
thank you so much I appreciate it thank you thank you thank you first of all it's an honor to share with you tonight um I'm so inspired lately with the release of the book I'm on fire I feel like literally I'm on fire you know the gift of fire it's appropriately named I think thank you so much for that two way and thank you once again for writing that forward that was so beautiful but throughout my life I've had lots of opportunities to make excuses about why I can't succeed and a lot of people told
me that you know nobody would think less of you if you didn't push so hard if you didn't fight so hard to fit in or or to Excel and whatever and I say you know what I didn't really push I never really did anything all I wanted to do was just be an equal to be seen as equal to everyone else I never thought about excelling you know beyond the normal uh ability level of of of of anybody I just wanted to fit in and be an equal no matter what it took that was my
thing no matter what it took I was going to be able to do the normal day-to-day tasks that I felt that I needed to do like buttoning shirts tying shoes which was a major major major struggle for me and I consider it the greatest achievement of my life now when I was burned I lost my fingers Lots in my hand toes as Wayne said lost my hair but I wanted to be able to tie my shoes because my peers were tying their shoes now I have a reconstructed th that I could barely use I had
no dexterity I couldn't grip the shoelaces on my right hand they tried to do the same thing on my as the left but it didn't really take too well I have practically no grip on this hand it was very difficult to grab the laces and I struggled with this for what seemed like an eternity seven years until I was able to successfully time my shoes now I've wised up I wear slip onon now but I succeeded at that task and I wasn't going to allow the daily failure toer me from succeeding and when I look
back at that when I was in it seems like it was an eternity but now the blink of an eye but that seven-year struggle has built something up inside of me I feel this this ability uh to achieve anything so shortly after that Victory I started playing drums and I come from a very very musical City New Orleans but how does a guy with no hands grip drumsticks well on my mind if I just tied my shoes I can do anything and I'm going to do it so I said whatever it takes and I sat
down with my dad and I got a drum instructor and we put our heads together and we created a method for me which I'll show you in a little bit but I have to admit Wayne I've been making an excuse for a lot of my life even though I was re able to tie my shoes and play drums I had one thing that I wanted to do more than pretty much anything and I said that I was probably not going to be able to do it because I couldn't grip ski poles but people thought I
was crazy told my family and friends I'm going to go ski I've got no toes a very oddly shaped foot that creates a lot of issues with the boots but I said whatever it takes I've always loved the Olympics and wanted to be a downhill skier so I decided to move to Steamboat Springs Colorado to pursue a dream that I had and people thought I was crazy but you know what one season later at 30 years old I'm an all Mountain skier and I compete in racing tournaments thank you it was a dream that I
had a vision a passion and I wasn't going to allow the fact that I couldn't use po to prevent me from skiing and I don't use poles but I use drumsticks and I want to show you guys how I play the drums but I also I don't want to keep this joy that I have from playing tonight I want you guys to play with me so I'm going to show you guys how I play the drums and then we're going to do a little rhythmic response I want you guys to ulate by clapping what I
do and we're going to see how far we can get with this we're going to have a good time right now so first how does a guy with no hands hold a jum stick on my left hand I had that reconstructed thumb on my right hand I use a tennis wristband with rubber bands wrapped around it this is my hand I slip it over my wrist put the jump stick inside and I've got full control took one month to develop this technique and I've had a lot of fun with it so we're going to get
it going I'm going to do some rhythms you guys try to keep up ready [Applause] [Music] can I oh you that [Music] [Music] all right thank you Danny Dan Caro ladies and gentlemen Dan Caro thank you thank you thank you thank you D thank you thank you my friend love you see you love you
