Dr. Wayne Dyer – Experiencing Swami From Within

Dr. Wayne Dyer

Dr. Wayne Dyer – Experiencing Swami From Within
- By Ted Henry

Dr. Wayne Dyer is a prominent American best-selling author and internationally recognized lecturer. Recently he was interviewed for a television news programme in Cleveland, Ohio. In the course of that interview Sathya Sai Baba’s name came up, and at the first mention of Sai Baba tears appeared in his eyes. He has never seen Sathya Sai Baba in person but said that he was well acquainted with Baba because He appeared often in his dreams.

How come Sathya Sai Baba is blessing Dyer by regularly appearing in his dreams? That is because Dyer is an intensely spiritual person. He is regularly featured on Public Television in America and he is considered one of the foremost inspirational speakers in the field of spiritual growth and personal development. He has written 25 books over the last 30 years, many of which have been bestsellers throughout the world.

For the first decade of his life, Dyer lived in an orphanage and foster homes. He now looks back on those years as being some of the most formative years of his life, a time during which he learnt the important lesson of self-reliance. He sees himself as the Eternal Soul who is disguised as an author, lecturer, father, husband and a thousand other things – he obviously takes his Advaitam seriously.

Part of Dyer’s popularity is due to the inclusion of many quotes from Swami in his books and presentations. One of his observations demonstrates his closeness to the Teachings of Sai Baba: “Send out love and harmony, put your mind and body in a peaceful place, and then allow the universe to work in the perfect way it knows how”.

In public lectures around the world, Dyer invariably brings up the name of Sai Baba. “I am not sure why He comes to me,” he says, “it just started happening several years ago. This is a Being who lives at God Consciousness who has, as Jesus had, the ability to manifest at will (like Jesus manifested fish and loaves). All of us have the ability to manifest, but there is the timeline between what we think and what we do.”

In a recent TV interview Dyer exclaimed, “Even as you speak (about Sai Baba), I get very emotional. I could almost break down and cry right now. It’s not a tear of sadness; it’s not a feeling that I am hurt in any way. It’s just the most blissful, peaceful (feeling). Do you know what it feels like to be in a warm shower when you have been out in the cold? It’s like having a warm shower running inside of you.”

This is how Dyer describes Baba’s appearances in his dreams:
“It’s an energy that moves up and down your spine and gives you goose flesh; only, it’s internal goose flesh. It’s just bliss. That’s the way it is and that’s how I feel.”

When asked why others don’t have such access to the many qualities of Sathya Sai Baba, Dyer replied that everyone has access but they do not want it. He adds, “It’s just that they believe they don’t. It’s like your question itself (about this) has resistance built in to it. You know the idea is that if you believe you don’t have something, then you don’t have it.”

Dyer says this is how people create resistance to what they want. “If you use phrases like ‘the worst-case scenario’ then you just can’t have ‘the best-case scenario’. You know, ‘as a man thinks, so he is’. It’s based on simple metaphysics. Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”

Often in his talks and frequently in his writings, Dyer teaches about non-attachment. About meeting Sai Baba in India one day he says, “I am not attached to it at all. Honestly, I am not. I don’t have any illusion that if He were to walk into this room right now, that it would be any different from this very experience (of talking about Him) right now”. Dyer adds, “It’s because I already feel Baba’s presence in this room right now. It’s just that strong.”

Dyer says, “I have a very, very strong internal knowing about my connection to Source (God) and Sai Baba is someone who lives at this level of God Consciousness. In David Hawkins book Power v/s Force, he speaks of a handful of people who live at this God-Realized level. He says they are steadfast in their abstention of thoughts of harm, that they don’t exclude anyone and that they include all, and Baba is one of those beings that calibrates at one of those exceptionally high spiritual levels that is commensurate with Source. He is Source Energy. He lives at Source Energy. He is God. We are all pieces of God, and He is there all the time.”

The latest book written by Dyer, The Power of Intention, describes the force brought to an individual’s life by ego and how it interacts with fear. “When you get ego out of the way,” he says, “when you just allow (life to be) and if you knew who it was who was walking beside you at all times on this path, then you would have no fear”. Dyer continues: “One of the quotes I like from Swami Paramananda is that when you reach God realization, nothing can go wrong, nothing can go wrong. All you have to do is live at the level I am speaking about and you don’t have to go around practising or worrying about it, you just have to reach for higher vibrational energy at any moment, which means staying connected to Source. One of the great questions to ask is, ‘Would God have this thought?’, and then to remind yourself that you are God, that you are a piece of God.”

Dyer says that by definition, anything that excludes cannot be spiritual. And he says that nearly all religions exclude. It’s one of the thoughts that makes this famous author so popular among those who know him. His life is dedicated to inclusiveness. It’s one of the reasons he speaks so forcefully about Sathya Sai Baba. He knows Sai Baba is all about inclusion. If Wayne Dyer is against anything for anyone, it is exclusion.

Reference

Arnold Schulman – Screenwriter, Author and Playwright

Arnold Schulman – Screenwriter, Author and Playwright

Arnold Schulman

Arnold Schulman (born August 11, 1925) is an American playwright, screenwriter, producer, a songwriter and novelist. He was a stage actor long associated with the American Theatre Wing and the Actors Studio.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Schulman attended the University of North Carolina where he took writing courses. He served with the Navy, and in 1946 came to New York City, where he began to write in earnest. He studied playwriting with Robert Anderson (Tea and Sympathy) in classes at New York’s American Theatre Wing, scripted for television during the early 1950s, making a transition to Hollywood films in 1957.

Schulman received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay for Love with the Proper Stranger in 1963 and for Best Adapted Screenplay for Goodbye, Columbus in 1969. He also received three Writers Guild nominations for Best Screenplay for Wild Is the Wind, A Hole in the Head and Love with the Proper Stranger, and a Writers Guild award for Goodbye, Columbus. Arnold Schulman authored a book entitled “Baba”, Viking Press, New York, 1971, which was a biography of Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba.

Arnold Schulman And The Sathya Sai Baba Debate
Sathya Sai Baba critics Sanjay Dadlani, Brian Steel and Robert Priddy have made reference to one page in Arnold Schulman’s book “Baba” to formulate the argument that there are discrepancies between Sathya Sai Baba’s “official” biography and biographical information obtained by Arnold Schluman from Sathya Sai Baba’s sister.

For example, Sanjay Dadlani made the following argument (which was similarly parroted by Brian Steel and Robert Priddy):

Just one example of this relates to the tale of a cobra, which allegedly appeared miraculously after Sathyanarayana Raju (Sai Baba’s birth name) was born. As Schulman noted: “One of Baba’s two sisters, however, who claims to have been present at his birth, says that the cobra was not found under the blanket, but several hours after Baba was born a cobra was seen outside the house, a sight not uncommon in the village.” It is curious to see how this significantly differs from several “official” accounts of the cobra event.

The funny thing about this is how N. Kasturi claimed to have collected his material by interviewing various family members and villagers. Kasturi dated this incidence as happening in July 1948, and later reveals that the book was finally published in 1960. Assuming that he included Baba’s own sister in his research project, that left a comfortable twelve years for compiling and publishing an authorised biography with the input of Sai Baba and several contemporaries. How fascinating it is to observe a close member of the Baba’s family disagreeing with a staple of the Sai mythos, leading one to wonder why Kasturi’s little anecdote was allowed to be left in at all? For me, the reason was clear; the propaganda machine thought nothing of overblowing this out of all proportion in order to promote the idea that Sai Baba is an incarnation of Vishnu.

In conclusion, we can carefully consider that there is a huge gulf between facts and interpretations of those facts. If anything tangible is to be gleaned from Schulman’s quote, it is that Sai Baba aggressively halted discussion about his past for a clear reason; the stories of all or most of his early escapades are probably untrue.

Needless to say, critics did not tell the whole story and apparently forgot to turn the page to read what Arnold Schulman had to say about Sathya Sai Baba’s sister and how he obtained information from her. Arnold Schulman said:

In some cases interpreters were needed to interpret the interpreters, as in the case of the interviews with one of Baba’s sisters who spoke only Telugu. At that particular time the available interpreters were a young man who spoke only Hindi and English, but no Telugu, and another young man who spoke Telugu and Hindi but no English. Everything the sister said had to be translated by one of the young men from Telugu into Hindi and then by the other young man from Hindi into English. Not only was this procedure frustratingly time-consuming but after being filtered through two separate and distinct personalities, what the writer was told the sister said might very well have been something quite different from what she actually said.

Are we to believe Kasturi’s biographical material on Sathya Sai Baba (when he actually spoke Telugu and had close, repeated, long-term and direct access to Sathya Sai Baba’s sister) or are we to believe information that Arnold Schulman obtained through two young translators whose accuracy even he strongly doubted?

It is also significant to point out that the biographical information that Arnold Schulman independently obtained and published in his book about Sathya Sai Baba is 99% the same as the biographical information obtained by Kasturi (a fact often overlooked by Sai Baba critics).

Even though critics continually attempt to use Arnold Schulman’s book against Sathya Sai Baba, it is an indisputable fact that Arnold Schulman had an entirely positive view about Sathya Sai Baba and his book received stunning reviews, even from Faubion Bowers who said of it:

“Arnold Schulman has written a miracle, photographed the invisible, incarnated ectoplasm in tangible words. More brilliant than any of his screenplays, but with their narrative suspense and superb character depiction, Baba is a poem of reality on multitudes of planes. Spiritually, for those who have the antennae, the book is an ultrasonic, transcendental experience. I was stunned by his book. It is a really fantastic venture into truth-telling.” – Faubion Bowers

It is also peculiar that critics of Sathya Sai Baba love to highlight the fact that Arnold Schulman entertained doubts about Sathya Sai Baba’s alleged God-hood. What is so amusing about critic’s highlighting Schulman’s doubts is that they (i.e., Sanjay Dadlani, Brian Steel and Robert Priddy) all formerly accepted and praised Sathya Sai Baba as God Incarnate and the Avatar of the Age.

It is very strange how critics condemn the very beliefs they once held about Sathya Sai Baba for many years (even decades) as belonging to the brainwashed, gullible, naive and mentally challenged. Since critic’s current criticisms speak volumes about their past brainwashing, gulliblity, naivete and mental challenges, what’s make them any more believable and credible now?