Changing the way we think is author Wayne Dyer's recipe for a happy and fulfilled life. Niamh Hooper reports on the utopian thoughts of the self-help guru.
'Change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change" is a concept easily dismissed as utopian. But international best-selling author and speaker Dr Wayne W Dyer isn't worried.
His latest book, The Power of Intention, on the concept has him back on the New York Times best-seller list, having sold 750,000 copies in hardback - a pretty sure sign others agree with, or are at least willing to further explore, the idea.
More than 30 years since his first book, The Erroneous Zones, became a self-empowerment classic, Dyer is intrigued by energy and the all-pervading role it plays in our lives: "Everything in the universe is energy, everything is movement. As Einstein said, 'nothing happens until something moves'. It's true not just for physical phenomena, it's true for our thoughts. We can do muscle testing to see if the thought we are having strengthens or weakens us," he says.
"If, for example, you're struggling with something in your life, say you're feeling ashamed - if you are muscle-tested when thinking that thought, you'll find you are very weak but if you can shift that thought to one of hope, faith, God, love, kindness or peace, if you can say 'I only attract good into my life and I will learn whatever I have to learn from this', you are suddenly strengthened and life starts to work on a whole different level."
At 65 and living in Hawaii, Dyer can talk. An inner shift from hatred to love towards the alcoholic father he never met has been the most significant experience of his life. Having grown up in a series of orphanages and foster homes in Detroit, the youngest of the three Dyer boys spent years trying to track down who abandoned his family.
In 1974, 10 years after his death at 49, Dyer found his father's grave in Biloxi, Mississippi. "I stood there for about three hours. It was beautiful and I truly feel his presence with me now and that he guides me. It was right after that I wrote The Erroneous Zones, quit drinking and began running eight miles every day for 22 years without missing a day. Everything started coming together after that." Now 28 books later, his is a career of taking complicated ideas and making them simple, he says. Don't die with your music still in you, he advises us and he certainly isn't.
When it comes to writing, he begins by putting a picture of the book he is going to write with the title already completed in front of him. "I look at it every single day before I've written one word. Then I sit and allow it to flow through me."
With a best-seller entitled 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace to his name, does he, like the rest of us, have bad days?
"All of us go up and down, we slip and have things that bother us." He cites the example of New Orleans: "A city of one million people has been totally destroyed but, on the other hand, going around being depressed about it isn't going to make it any better. I've decided to make a video to help young people make some contributions for it and I've written a very sizeable cheque for it. We'll rebuild it - that's what we do. So that turns a bad day into something you can do something about."
For those lost in life his advice is simple: Connect to God and look for something to be grateful for.
One of Dyer's 10 Secrets is give it all away. "We came in with nothing, we leave with nothing so the only thing you can do with your life is literally give it away. It's in giving that you receive. If you take a coin, there's heads on one side and tails on the other. You can't put heads in one drawer and tails in the other - you don't get to do that, they go together. Giving and receiving are like that."
With wry amusement, he observes how the great spiritual leaders like Jesus or Buddha were single. "Do that with eight children and that's something", he challenges as a father of eight!
Never religious as a child, Dyer has always had a strong faith there is something bigger than his life that orchestrates it all - "all you've to do is listen to your heartbeat and watch your hair and fingernails grow" - and that he is a piece of God.
Aware of the reaction the mention of God can provoke, Dyer explains: "God, to me, is a source, the invisible source of all things in the universe. Not only do metaphysicians believe this but so do the scientists. Even quantum physics teaches us particles don't come from particles, that form doesn't start out from form - it is the spirit that gives life.
"We don't start out as a drop of human protoplasm because our parents got together one night. If you try to find where we came from and take it down to its tiniest source, you'll find there's no form there.
"So what is this place, idea, consciousness that we all show up from? I think one of the simplest truths is you must be like what you came from. What we came from is God energy so that must be what we're like. The question is why did we leave it?"
So why did we?
"It's what we call the Ego - Edging God Out. We're raised around people who have come to believe what the Sanskrit teachers call the 'false illusion' - the idea that I am what I have, what my body is, what I do and accomplish, what other people think of me and I am separate from everybody else.
"The only place we can be separate from God is when we take on a belief system that says that," he says. "We can't be but if we believe we are, we can attract all kinds of negativity that interferes with our fulfilment, abundance and health."