As I began to read through Wayne Dyer’s classic Manifest your Destiny, I started to feel not a comfort but a homeliness, in the sense that where this was leading was a place that the soul of my being could find rest in. Despite being ready to take the journey, this journey, like others of a transformational nature, started with trepidation at the prospect of walking into the unknown. It has been said that the spirit brings solace, but not immediately. As I worked my way through those first few chapters, I started to gain a greater understanding that I would have to work for any pearls of wisdom that I would come to.
Like many other self-help books of its genre, the implicit task of Dyer’s book was to apply what you learnt from its lessons to the context of your own life. Requiring of me an honesty and introspectiveness that I had not yet cultivated, I found opening up to being able to commence that work a formidable barrier. Without having really connected to myself prior to that point, my focus became more about absorbing as many insights as I could from it and then trusting that this opening into a deeper realm of consciousness would take place. Despite not knowing when these learnings would begin to impress themselves, I persisted in making it through to the end.
While it was a very intense read, especially for someone who was not familiar with the spiritual mode of writing and the concept of ego that was explored throughout the work, I did feel as I was reading it that the work was speaking to me in a way that other books hadn’t done previously. Knowing now what my vocation is to connect others with their spiritual calling so that they can be led by that spirit to lead in the world, I had a core resonance with the teachings of the book that in essence was the spirit of it leading me to a more intimate relationship with my true self. Even as I was reading it and learning more about what the ego is, I started to see its presence in my life, and how it controlled so much of how I perceived the world and interacted in it.
From this, I began the journey of becoming conscious to my unconsciousness, which was a progressive step away from being unconscious to my unconsciousness. In this space or distance that was created, came the opportunity to look at myself anew in a purer light that was untainted by all of the conditioning that had informed who I understood myself to be up until that point in my life. While not necessarily perceiving myself to be a victim of my father’s death which had happened a few years earlier, I was still carrying a lot of emotional baggage that I had yet to process around the pain that the event had generated for me. As I learned about Dyer’s fractured relationship with his father and how he only came to reconcile his suffering from that after his father’s death, I found a hope that not only could I heal the wounds that I had suffered, but that I could emerge on the other side as a more integrated human being.
Despite the fullness of this healing not being completed at that time, one of the initial things that I took from his teachings on this was that we are not the pain that we (or the ego more specifically) identifies with. While no doubt it is there in our being as a consequence of the adversity that we have experienced, it doesn’t have the power to consume us and drive our behaviour unless we let it. To someone of my age at the time, that was transformative because I didn’t have the perspective to see myself as in some sense separate from the pain, and because of this the negativity that I felt so intensely became a guiding force in how I interfaced with the world. Why I think that my coming to these books was such a godsend for my mother was because prior to that time I was rebelling against her authority quite furiously which was causing a fair bit of tension between us. After reading that book, and others with similar themes, like Meeting the Shadow by Jeremiah Abrams and Connie Zweig, I could see the connection that this rebellion was an externalisation of the inner pain that I was harbouring. While being somewhat of an obvious insight now, at the time, in that well of suffering, it carried a larger weight and latent impetus to climb out of that well and experience freedom.
Dr. L. Christian Duperouzel 