with specific suggestions at the end of each short essay explaining how you can implement the lessons in your life. I want to provide you with insights that you can apply from some of our most esteemed teachers, rather than have you learn their poetry and prose and passively conclude, “Well, that’s nice for a literature or humanities class, but that was then and this is now.” I recommend that you read each selection with an openness to the idea that these towering minds share the same divinity and life force as you do and are talking to you directly in their own unique language and art form, and that you are going to apply their wisdom to your life beginning today!
As I wrote each of these essays, I looked at a portrait or photograph of the teacher I was highlighting and I would literally ask the individual, “What would you like those of us here today to know?”—and I would listen and surrender. I allowed myself to experience their guidance and my writing became almost automatic. It may sound strange, but I actually felt the presence of those writers and poets with me as I wrote each of these sixty pieces.
Many of the selections in this book are poems. I view poetry as a language of the heart-not just a form of entertainment or a subject to get past in school, but another way to transform our lives by communicating our wisdom to one another. Here are three examples from my own life of how poetry, the language of the heart, has touched me.
Many years ago, when I received my doctorate, I was at a festive celebration where I was given many nice gifts. The gift that touched me most deeply was a poem written by my mother, which still hangs in my office almost thirty years later. I reproduce it here to illustrate how poetry, which doesn’t have to originate in the minds of renowned celebrities, can touch us where we live.
A mother can but guide …
then step aside—I knew
I could not say, “This is the way
that you should go.”
For I could not foresee
what paths might beckon you
to unimagined heights
that I might never know.
Yet, always in my heart
I realized
That you would touch a star …
I’m not surprised!
When my oldest daughter, Tracy, was just a toddler of five or six, she sent me a picture she had drawn in school along with a poem that expressed from her tender heart how she felt. Her mother and I had separated, and she knew the pain that I felt in not living with her every day. This too has been framed and hangs on the wall next to my desk.
Even if the sun stops shining,
Even if the sky is never blue
It won’t matter
Because I’ll always love you.
Reading those precious thoughts expressed poetically from my daughter never fails to tug at my heart and produce tears of gratitude in my eyes.
Finally, our daughter Sommer wrote this poem as a Christmas gift for her mother. It sits, framed, beside her bed for her to read every night.
What Your Love Means to Me
Knowing your smile greets
Me at the door
And your kind words leave
Me with no worries.
Every time I slip a step
You help me to my feet
And when you and I laugh
Together I only feel complete.
Your love for us shines through
On every cloudy day
To think you’d ever abandon
Us isn’t possible in any way.
A Mom like you is impossible
The kind you’ll never see
That’s why I love you
That’s what your love means to me.
As I said, poetry is the language of the heart, and you are about to have your heart touched by sixty majestic souls who wrote directly to you from another place and another time. This book will serve you best if you think of it as a way of reconnecting to those great souls who have left our material world in body form but are still very much with us in a spiritual sense.
I encourage you to make this book a two-month renovation project of your soul in which you read only one selection each day and then make a conscious effort to apply the suggestions that day. When you have completed the sixty days, use this as a reference book. Look at the sixty subjects in the table of contents, and if you need a boost in patience, mercy, kindness, meditation, forgiveness, humility, leadership, prayer, or anything else covered by our ancestral masters, then read that contribution. Review the essay and work on applying the specific recommendations. Let your life be guided by greatness!
To me, this is the way to teach poetry, prose, and literature; let it come alive, let it shimmer in your mind and then take that inner awakening and put it to work. All of us are deeply grateful to those who make life throb to a swifter, stronger beat. These great teachers from the past have done that for me, and I encourage you to apply this language of the heart from the wisdom of the ages to your life.
God bless you,
Wayne W. Dyer
Learn to be silent.
Let your
quiet mind
listen and absorb.
PYTHAGORAS
(580 B.C.–500 B.C.)
A Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras was especially interested in the study of mathematics in relation to weights and measures and to musical theory.
All man’s miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL
(1623-1662)
Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and writer, whose treatises contributed to the fields of hydraulics and pure geometry.
This is the one time in this collection of great contributors that I have elected to highlight two writers on the same subject. I selected two men whose lives were separated by over two millennia, both of whom in their own times were considered the most knowledgeable in the rational fields of mathematics and science.
Pythagoras, whose writings influenced the thought of Plato and Aristotle, was a major contributor to the development of both mathematics and Western rational philosophy. Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher who lived twenty-two centuries after Pythagoras, is considered one of the original scientific minds. He is responsible for inventing the syringe, the hydraulic press, and the first digital calculator. Pascal’s Law of Pressure is still taught in science classes around the world today.
Keeping in mind the left-brained scientific leanings of these two scientists, reread their two quotes. Pascal: “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pythagoras: “Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.” They both speak to the importance of silence and the value of meditation in your life, whether you are an accountant or an avatar. They send us a valuable message about a way of being in life that is not popularly encouraged in our culture: that there is tremendous value in creating alone time in your life that is spent in silence. If you want to shed your miseries, learn to sit silently