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  This is a shift of paramount significance. When you are focused in your mind on what you can learn from an experience, your mind cannot dwell on thoughts that will lead to your suffering, thoughts such as “Why me?” “Isn’t this terrible!” and “I’m so unlucky.” The shift in your mind allows you to look at the outcome of an event or experience and what you can learn from it. Instead of a poor-me approach, you shift to a learning approach. You ask yourself, “How can I create the outcome that I want with this illness that I am presently experiencing?” or “What can I learn about myself and how much strength can I muster to deal effectively with this problem?”

  Many people spend their entire lifetime on this second path. They are beyond suffering as a life-style. They are always asking, “What will the outcome be for me?” These are the goal-oriented people focused on quotas and specific ambitions, which they work toward assiduously. They see obstacles as opportunities. Living at outcome is far superior to living at suffering. It gives one’s life focus and keeps one motivated to set higher and higher goals. It virtually eliminates the suffering born of self-pity. For many people who are living their lives at outcome, there can be no higher place. They are centered on outcome, and when it is achieved they look for newer and grander results. What is missing in their lives, however, is the possibility of experiencing real magic, and the ability to make miracles happen. For this, one needs to go to the third path on this metaphoric journey.

  3. ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH PURPOSE “Nothing is more likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life.” Victor Frankl wrote those words as he endured the insanity and brutality of a Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. Learning that you have a heroic mission and getting in step with that mission is the third path I am encouraging you to take as you begin to introduce real magic into your life. I call this path enlightenment through purpose.

  Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion is also flowing through you. In order to experience real magic it is necessary to make a dramatic shift from outcome to purpose. You begin accomplishing this by viewing your presence here from a new perspective. Give this new way of thinking about yourself a brief try and see if it makes sense and feels right. If you feel this is absurd and not something that works for you, go back to outcome or learning via suffering.

  GETTING TO PURPOSE

  Here is one way to begin the process of getting to purpose. First think about the concept of eternity. Admittedly this is a mind-boggling notion, but just consider what eternity means. No beginning, no end, just like the concept of God or nature or the universe. Only always. As you contemplate this business of eternity, keep in mind that you are doing so from within a physical form, your body, that did begin and will end. This physical self can consider a concept that defies beginnings and ends but cannot experience it directly. This must be left to your mind. Still, the concept of eternity is something that you can accept. You know the universe doesn’t end at any particular place. You know that there was something called life that existed before your conception. If you can consider eternity from within your noneternal body, it must be due to something within your nonphysical self.

  Try thinking of your life as a parenthesis in eternity. The parenthesis opens at the moment of your conception and closes at the instant of your death. The space within this parenthesis is your life, surrounded by something called eternity. That something which we label eternity is not experienced physically, yet it exists in some mysterious way within the mind. There is something that is very much a part of us that is invisible. Call it mind, thoughts, consciousness, soul, even Louise if you like. How you spell it doesn’t matter. The invisible self, the part that is not your physical sensory self, is the part that can contemplate eternity. If you even mildly accept the notion of eternity, then it is real for you. If you can live with the idea of eternity, then the idea is yours to explore. And if you are at the point where you can consider eternity or endlessness as, at the very least, a curiosity, then you can use this curiosity to help get your life on purpose. Here is how.

  First remind yourself that everything exists for some reason as a part of the perfect intelligence that is the universe. Next, in your mind, right here and now, whatever age you are, think back ten years and imagine yourself at that age. Examine what you thought about at that time, how you dressed, what you felt, whom you admired. How much of what you experienced then led you to where you are today? Now, go back ten more years in your mind and see how each and every experience and learning led you to the next place and the next place, until you again arrive at today.

  If you are candid, you will discover that each experience in your life was absolutely necessary in order to have gotten you to the next place, and the next, up until this very moment. This mental exercise is very useful in developing your ability to contemplate and meditate. Ultimately you can go back to being a child again in your mind. You will see that the childhood experiences, whatever they were, helped that little person you were to become a bigger person and eventually the adult that you are today. I am not asking you to judge, to like or dislike, to approve or disapprove. Simply see that each experience led to the next and offered you something to either grow on or not grow on. You had to have those experiences, and the evidence for that point of view is that you did. Pure and simple. You did! Then you moved to the next experience and the next, all intertwined in some invisible way, and all leading to now. You may have been at suffering, you may have been at outcome, but you still had those experiences, and nothing can ever change that.

  As you go backward in your mind to your childhood, from the perspective of the present moment, and earnestly look at all of your life experiences, the good and the bad, the terrible and the ecstatic, you begin to know right in this moment that there is some kind of invisible force running through your physical life that connects it all together. There is meaning in there someplace, and every single event of your life is in some way related to the next event. There is the person who seemed to come into your life in some coincidental way, who introduced you to someone else, who led you to something that turned your entire life around. You realize that without that coincidental stranger you would not have met your lifetime partner, or created the children that you did, or gone to the school that you went to, or entered the business that became your way of life, or whatever. Little, seemingly unconnected and meaningless events, viewed from the perspective of now, all led you to this very moment reading these words.

  As you travel in your mind, you can go all the way back to your infancy, right back to your very beginning. You know in your rational mind that there was an instant, a speck of time, in which you were conceived. Keeping in mind the two essential components of this exercise—that eternity is a concept you can contemplate in a noneternal body and that the universe is purposeful and perfect—mentally contemplate the speck of time immediately preceding your conception when you were still part of eternity, the instant in eternity just before your parenthesis opened. There had to be such an instant when, for whatever reason, you came from what we call nothingness (no boundaries, no rules, no limits, no form) to somethingness. The question I pose to you is “Why?” Why would you go from formlessness to form and show up in this human body to live for a period of time and then go back into eternity, or formlessness?

  One could speculate all day on why such a journey is undertaken. Some believe that they made the choice to enter the physical world of limits and boundaries. Others see it as God’s will. Still others see it as a monstrous, meaningless accident, simply a cosmic coincidence. But whatever you choose to believe, you know it did happen. I suggest that your presence in the world of form has a grand mission and that you can discover and begin thinking, feeling and behaving in ways consistent with that mission.

  I, Wayne W. Dyer, have gone back in my meditations and discovered why I showed up
in form, was conceived, back in 1939. It seems very clear to me. I have asked God (or whatever you call that invisible part of ourselves) and I have received answers. I know my grand mission and what it is about for me. I accept that I was born in 1940 to accomplish certain things, and that each and every experience of my life since conception has led me to this purpose. I believe that I had and still have the power to choose to align myself with this perfect order, and that while I was misaligned I was that way for a reason as well.

  My purpose has been clearly revealed to me through the process of prayer and meditation. It matters not at all to me how others view my behavior in getting to purpose in my life. The knowing that I have has been revealed to me in the clearest and most profound manner. My purpose is to give, to serve, to promote peace and prosperity and to become totally, unconditionally loving to all people. Willa Cather summarizes what I am writing about:

  Where there is great love there are always miracles. Miracles rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming to us from afar off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

  Yes, something is there about us always.

  Getting to purpose in life—by going within and discovering that purpose is about loving unconditionally and serving, and making contact with what is there about us always—alters one’s worldview dramatically. Miracle making is then just around the corner. Suffering decreases measurably because the emphasis ceases to be “Why me?” You know that what you are experiencing is necessary and valuable in a way that you likely do not understand at the time it is happening. Nevertheless you still go with it. If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is “the quiet acceptance of what is.” No judgment, no anger or bitterness, no hostility or remorse but a quiet willingness to go with it rather than to fight it.

  When you go beyond outcome in life you find yourself unconcerned about what is in it for you. Thoughts, feelings and behavior focus more and more on the fulfillment of your purpose. You go beyond success, achievement and performance as indications of your life’s mission. Instead every moment is lived fully and lovingly. Material possessions cease to dominate your thoughts, which is not to say that they disappear. They simply cease to be the focus of life. Instead, your purpose takes hold, and you gain a sense of joy and inner harmony knowing that you are divinely fulfilling your reason for being here. As Michel de Montaigne put it so succinctly: “The great and glorious masterpiece of man is how to live with purpose.”

  There is an enormous irony that comes with reaching purpose in your life. The things that you previously believed to be so significant lose their allure. You no longer care about what is coming your way, yet lo and behold you find that those very things arrive in your life in larger and larger amounts. Joy, however, is not found in the arrival of those “rewards” but in the experience of thinking and acting purposefully. Giving becomes more important than getting because giving is in alignment with your purpose. You no longer want the burden of collecting, categorizing, insuring and worrying about possessions. You know the meaning of Satya Sai Baba’s pronouncement, “Man’s many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has, the more they weigh him down.” You absolutely know when you have reached purpose. No one has to tell you. You know because you no longer question the meaning of your life. You know that all that you do is synchronized with God’s work, because you are at harmony and every single activity of your life is involved in the fulfillment of your purpose.

  Are you willing to get your life to purpose? Are you prepared to go back in your mind to the moment before you came into form to ask your higher self, “Why did I come here?” When you receive the answer, which will be about giving rather than receiving, regardless of your vocation, you will automatically begin to shift your life energy from suffering to purpose. Once you begin the journey toward a life on purpose, you enter the realm of real magic.

  REAL MAGIC, MIRACLES AND PURPOSE

  When you are at purpose you are truly flowing with life, experiencing a kind of harmony that comes from not having to strive for something else. In short, you lighten up, figuratively and literally. This comes from the new knowing that enables you to go about your life’s work free of worrisome thoughts. You sense that you are being watched over, and your actions come from this inner beatitude of rightness or centeredness. When you are acting out of that inner knowing which constantly reminds you that you are on purpose and that you trust yourself to act out of that purpose, the right thing is all that you can do.

  The holiest book of the Hindu faith is called the Bhagavad Gita (the Song of the Lord). It is the story of Arjuna, the most renowned warrior of his time, and Krishna (God), who appears to Arjuna on the battlefield as Arjuna prepares to do battle. Krishna appears in the physical form of Arjuna’s charioteer. In eighteen short chapters Krishna talks with Arjuna about the essence of being a divine and purposeful human being. This is the book on which Mahatma Gandhi modeled his life. Summarized briefly the Gita’s message is: Behave in ways consistent with love and harmony and do not be attached in any way to the fruits of your labor. If you can attain this state of grace your life will become miraculously peaceful. Live your life entirely on purpose and renounce any and all credit that may come your way from your actions. Be consistently aware of the need to serve God and to serve others in any and all of your actions. This is the way of the miracle worker.

  You may be thinking that this is a nice philosophy but one that is too simplistic in the dog-eat-dog, competitive world of the twentieth century. I acknowledge and respect your reservations. In fact, I lived with similar skepticism for the larger portion of my life. I had to go through suffering in order to learn life’s lessons; I was totally focused on outcomes and was not a believer in matters metaphysical, nor was I interested in hearing about being detached from the results of my labors. I was in it for the results. I was focused on my destination, not the journey. The issues of my life concerned rewards, money, prestige and accomplishments. While I was certainly a “success” in conventional ways, I had no idea about going beyond these extreme indices, or about real magic. I can only say that miracles and real magic began to show up in my life when I got myself to purpose. Only when I stopped being concerned about what was coming to me was I able to be in a state of grace.

  Here is a portion of a letter I received recently from a reader in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, that describes the experience of readiness to discover one’s life purpose.

  Dear Wayne:

  As I sit by the fire in my den, my favorite room, I feel so peaceful. All the usual things are happening. Nine P.M., three children going off to bed, my husband packing his bags for this Phoenix trip, etc.

  I sit here in the same room, the same clothes. I know I look the same and yet I am not the same person. I walk in the park across from my home every day and I listen to your tapes on my Walkman. This is “my time,” no phones, no children, no noise, only your voice in my ears and the beautiful park I have come to love so much. I wonder why I didn’t hear you ten years ago, or five years ago when I was so unhappy. I realized that I wouldn’t have listened then, not like I am listening now. Now is my time to hear your message. Now I am truly listening and I love what I hear. Tomorrow I will walk again and probably finish hearing The Awakened Life. I can just walk and walk and walk while listening to you. It’s so peaceful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. My life is now a miracle unfolding everyday. I am on purpose.

  For this woman, her life is a miracle yet nothing outside has changed. The children, the chores, the job are all still there, but she feels purposeful now and is unconcerned about what the outcomes are going to be. This is the state I am hoping to help you to achieve.

  Yes you can create miraculous changes in your life. Yes you have the power within you to manifest what may have seemed impossible only a short time ago. Yes you can know the meaning of real magic
in your life. The setting for making this your reality is right there inside you. Get yourself aligned with your purpose. Discover the joy and peace of giving, not getting; of contributing, not acquiring; of doing, not competing or winning. Why? Because you can’t really get anything. The message of your life is in what you give. You show up with nothing. You leave with nothing. All you truly can do with this life in form is to give it away. Purpose is always about giving. When you experience giving, serving, loving and promoting harmony you will feel the difference within yourself. André Gide summed it up so beautifully in his journal: “Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.”

  As you prepare for this exploration of real magic, you may be asking, “How will I do it?” “What if I need help?” These are sensible questions to which I want to help you find your answers.

  WHEN THE STUDENT IS READY

  The first time I read the Bhagavad Gita it was as if a lightning bolt had illuminated my life. I had a similar experience when I read St. Paul’s letters in the New Testament. Both of these wise and ancient works had been part of my library for over thirty years. I must have passed by them hundreds of thousands of times and probably had glanced through them as a young boy and a college student. Yet they had no meaning for me until I was ready, when they guided me to miraculous discoveries and helped me to get my life on purpose.

  An ancient Zen proverb says, “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.” When you are truly determined in your own mind to experience real magic and to live each day at purpose, you will be shown how to make it happen. Let’s examine the four key words in this Zen proverb.