Destiny, real freedom & inner peace

Often, important inspirations in life are the consequence of deep but positive cuts: a separation, a new job or self-employment – such things often have the effect of a fundamental life change. All new beginnings are surprising, often to yourself. It may be a wrenching impact or just a blink of an eye that throws you out of your day-to-day routine.

For Wayne Dyer, it all started with a glass of beer. Or rather, a beer that didn’t exist.

For one of the best-known psychologists in the US (over 30 million copies sold of his book Your Erroneous Zones), the occasion for a fundamental change was rather trivial. For many years, Dyer had been in the habit of having a few beers in the evening. This included the ritual of ordering two beers at a restaurant to start with, just in case there was no waiter nearby when the first glass was empty.

Then, one evening, Dyer was out for dinner with his family when he was regretfully informed that the restaurant would be unable to serve him alcohol; the previous evening the restaurant had temporarily lost its liquor license due to an incident. Dyer reacted quite disproportionately by his standards and made his family go to another restaurant.

Later, he reflected on himself and his actions. He started questioning the point of having beers every night and ordering two at once. He was ashamed – vis-à-vis the restaurant staff, vis-à-vis his family, vis-à-vis himself. It had less to do with alcohol addiction, but instead with having a dreary ritual for which there was no need, and perhaps not even an explanation. Above all, he had subjected everything to his irrational will – with an accumulation of behavioral patterns he was unconscious of.

Dyer first decided to not have a beer the next evening. The morning after, he recalls in the must-see movie Shift (2009), “I woke up very early and smelled the smell of fresh roses, the likes of which I had never noticed before. There was a cartoon on the wall, other things I still vividly recall.”

That was it – and not just for his beer habit. Dyer didn’t hit the bottle again for the rest of his life. Less to avoid his mental addiction than to never lose his newly found feeling of being alive. Dyer had recovered his senses. He saw his surroundings, his environment and, ultimately, the world itself in a new way. There may have been psychological or biological reasons for this. The new perception was what mattered. The blink of an eye. The one small twist that changed everything else. Dyer realigned his life, like the needle of a compass, by reflecting on what had been going wrong before. And what was to have “meaning” in the future: a significance which was not based on his ego, but which was outside of his own self. The way he speaks and walks through Shift like a living Buddha is marked by a deep contentment at being at peace with himself.

Even when poet Rainer Maria Rilke expresses, “You must change your life,” in his poem, this is subject only to a single perception – in this case, a statue in the Louvre in Paris, which prompts him to engage in a digressive inner monologue.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk used the last line as the title for a book as a “summary, condensation and evaporation of all religious teachings, exercise instructions and trainings that point people’s own ‘vertical tensions’ out to them and remind them to become aware of their opportunities, to surpass themselves and, ultimately, to work out ‘with a god’.”

Or another example, in Franz Kafka’s “Doorkeeper’s Parable”, a man sees the light meant for him behind a door, but recoils from it and hides behind laws that absolve him of his personal responsibility; a parable that, according to Ulrich Karthaus (in Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s 1000 German Poems), “(symbolizes) an individual imperative of one’s own life, an unrealized potential that we abruptly realize in fulfilling moments of our lives.”
Dyer could certainly subscribe to that. For the real shift, the turning point, does not consist in looking for a new job, partner or place to live, but in shifting away and searching for the source of one’s true destiny and potential. Only then do we approach our own nature (again), i.e. our own God within us, the spirit that guides us as human beings. This is where humans connect with the principles of their own creation. Everything external, material, dissolves. The organic, essential, the essence returns to the foreground. It was never really gone, but is the core intelligence of our existence, as it is laid out in us at birth – and thus “nothing is missing, everything has already been ordered” (Dyer).

The only question remaining: How do you regain access to this original destiny? First and foremost, by means of our own disillusionment, by means of the destruction of ego. Whether we get cozy in our comfort zone, aim to avoid any personal responsibility or go through our life with only existential rituals (including getting rich), all this is subject to self-interests that are not self-interests. Ego people follow individual values, which turn out to be disappointments.

Tao people follow the general, unchangeable values of the laws of nature. According to Dyer’s research, this is the true interest in synchronicity: to be in touch with the source, the laws of creation. “Then a powerful organizing intelligence begins to work for us. Fate is then no longer the driving force, life no longer a struggle, because your own source always seems to nourish you.”