Dr. Wayne Dyer - Manifest Your Destiny   Ancient wisdom from the East reveals the best way to know our future is to create it. Not from a separate God who lives apart from us in the heavens in an exterior realm, but his spirit, his force, his unconditional love lives within us, part of the same force we use in both our thoughts and words, which in turn, are our two creative forms of energy that we either knowingly or unknowingly use to create, manifest, and determine our future destiny. Our entire life, conditions, relationships and outcome are unknowingly the product of our thinking, our creative forces within. Dyer introduces us to these ancient Eastern and mostly private spiritual and mystical principles without the need to become part of religious subculture, activity and corporate entities, as discovering God and our awareness of him is an individual experience, gaining our ability to this higher consciousness of truth, that can lead us to know how to use our creative thoughts and words in our eternal now, our ground of being. The principal of being a co-creator with God, that we, as humans, have the ability to use our creative forces to manifest our destinies, can be found in such spiritual masters, as Thomas Merton, Paul Tillich and Thich Nhat Nanh, to name only a few. What so many fundamentalists and those unfamiliar with these ancient principals are so quick to call "new age" philosophy, fail to realize is that these teachings are older than the Judeo/Christian culture itself and are the core of our very ground of being. Outlining 9 spiritual principles which, when followed sequentially, will lead us to getting everything we want, yet what we find out, is that what we want is not necessarily what we think we want, for it is the feelings we receive, the peace and joy within that we desire, as opposed to the object or physical manifestation we think we desire to obtain these inner feelings. 1. "Become aware of your Highest Self" concludes that our Highest Self only wants us to be at peace. I personally, can think of nothing else that I would rather have at this moment than peace with myself. I am sure that this resonates with most of you. It is not our intellects and the desires of our egos that convinces us we all all separate, but it is out intuitive selves that allow us to rise above physical appearances, competition and superiority to our service of others, more so, to reconizing that we are spiritual beings in a physical realm, detaching ourselves from situations as observers, letting go of our need to be right. We exist as spiritual beings of unlimited supply of energy or spirit that we are all part of, the universal mind, the unseen life force of intelligence that exists in all life. This is our higher self. Dr. Dyer gives us a road map on how to achieve this principle. 2. "Trusting yourself is trusting the Wisdom that created you." "On that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you" - JOHN 14:20. All spiritual traditions support this belief, with Confucianism articulating it best with "Heaven, earth and human are of one body". When we trust in ourselves , we trust in God at the same time, because "you and the Father are one." Unlike the "sinner in need of a savior" mentality, having faith in yourself allows you the freedom to know God, the life force of love in the ground of your being, to be all that you can be. A powerful principle indeed, but one which is most difficult to accept, because of our conditioning, taught as being separate from both God and one another. Dyer echos spiritual mystics such as Thomas Merton when he writes, "heaven on earth is a choice we must make, not a place we must find." 3. "You are not an organism in an environment." You are an environorganism", establishes that there is no separation between us and anything else outside us in the material world. We are all connected to the same spirit and energy, as the waves of the ocean are distinct, yet inseparable to the whole. Dr. Dyer invites us to shift our awareness away from ourselves as organisms in the environment and see ourselves as an extension of our environment and inseparable from it. Seeing ourselves as "one" with God, the earth, the environment and all other people, allow us to see our interconnection and futility of impatience and strife, to gain the awareness of trancending all differences in peace and kindness. This allows us to see our connectedness to the one universal spirit of all energy and thoughts, to know that our thought, although self contained, are part of all thoughts and energy and therefore we have the ability to manifest what we already are a part of. Gaining higher conciousness in this area is the answer need to align ourselves with the unconditional energy. 4. "You can attract to yourself what you desire." This establishes that because we are already connected to God and to the environment, we have the power to attract that which we are already connected to. Dr. Dyer reminds us that our thoughts and visualizations are the source of our manifesting. The power of mental pictures in meditation plays a powerful part in our thoughts that is our creative energy, that we project out into the universe, which manifests itself after we let go, relax and trust both in ourselves as far as our connectedness, and in God to bring forth the power of our creative thoughts. Our meditation and mental picturing are tools to activate this energy within us and make it work for us. Use the ability of our creative power to convert the energy of our thoughts into a newly materialized form-- manifestation. The principal of all life being, energy creates matter. This is true of all things, including both our thoughts and speech. 5. "Honor your worthiness to receive", compels us to re-examine the attitudes that we knowingly and unknowingly hold about our lives. We disrupt the natural flow of energy and create a blockage that makes manifestation impossible, if we feel unworthy. "As a man thinketh, so is he" is a basic truth of how the universe works. To feel that it is selfish or non-spiritual to desire and manifest is to divide the world of spirit and the world of matter into polar opposites. When we adopt an attitude of spirit being incompatible with matter, we are denying the spirit that is in matter as its originating energy. We also deny the validity of ourselves as spiritual beings. "God is me, and I am God" is the truth that will free us from our feelings of unworthiness to attract to ourselves all that we desire. 6. "Connect to the Divine Source with unconditional love." The love that God has for us is without condition. Since we are an extension of God, and if we are to love unconditionally, we have to rid ourselves of all judgment, anger, moralizing, preaching, hate and all of the various tools of the ego. If we place restrictions on our love, or withhold it dependent on our judgments and hatreds, we make it a conditional love, and we remove ourselves from the possibility of co-creating with God. 7. "Meditate to the sound of Creation" is about using sound as a tool for opening to the potential and power of our creative force. Sounds are a powerful energy. They mold the abstract world of thought and spirit into shapes. Anotherwards, sound is part of the dimension that exists between the world of spirit and the world of material. Sound has healing properties and is also used in the creation process. Words and sounds can attract positive or negative influences into our lives. Harmonious sounds are the ones that most contribute to a balanced and creative life. All recorded history of humankind describes a creator of the God word and of humankind. The sound that is in all of these names for the Creator is the sound "aaah". This sound is the sound of creation, and it is the sound of joy. "Aaah" expresses a feeling of bliss and joy. The sound of creation and joy are synonymous. Dr. Dyer suggests that when we meditate with the "aaah" sound, we should use our creative energy of thoughts to create mental pictures while using this sound emanating through chakra openings in our bodies, connecting with what we want to attract or create in our world of form. The "Om" sound relates to that of gratitude. All names of God in all cultures commonly contain the "Aaah" sound, while peace such as "Shalom," contain both sounds, the meaning of true enlightenment is peace. 8. "Patiently detach from the outcome". It emphasizes the need for removing demands and becoming infinitely patient. There is only one power in the universe and we are connected to that power. By demanding that God send our desires according to our timetable and design reinforces the incorrect idea of God as a separate energy. Though we have been conditioned to believe that we are individual, we are actually a part of the grand universal nature that is infinite in its possibilities. We have to recognize the universal as a part of all that we are, and that all that we are is undifferentiated from all that is. One of the ways to develop patience is to contemplate how patient God has been with us. When we have removed the doubt about our ability to manifest, it will be easy to detach ourselves from the outcome and all of the details. Let us practice the patience that God has always displayed toward us and trust in ourselves and in the divine energy of the universe. 9. "React to your manifestations with gratitude and generosity." Gratitude is our expression of acknowledging the oneness of the universal energy working in cooperation with our desires. It represents the whole of ourselves. When our heart is filled with gratitude, it is grateful for everything and cannot focus on what is missing. The natural extension of being grateful is the development of a generous heart. And, it is in the expression of our generosity that we feel most connected to the unconditional love of the universal spirit. Generosity is helpful for our own liberation in that it teaches us about the inner qualities of letting go. Letting go and releasing our attachments are the most freeing things we can do to liberate ourselves from the ego.