This interview was published in the Sept. 2004 issue of Science of Mind.

Dr. Wayne Dyer has made it his life’s mission to raise the spiritual consciousness of the world, and from the looks of things, he’s succeeding. His latest book, The Power of Intention, published earlier this year, quickly sped to the top of the bestseller lists, including those of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Many of Dyer’s 20-plus other books have also been bestsellers, including his first one, Your Erroneous Zones, in 1976, which sold 25 million copies in its first year. His personal appeal is no less powerful, as evidenced by his numerous speaking engagements on motivational, spiritual, and higher consciousness topics. In conjunction with the new book’s release, he taped a three-hour special of the same name for PBS, which was viewed by millions of people around the country as it was aired 1700 times over several weeks.

Dyer’s current success would not have come about had he not harnessed the power of intention for himself, even if he didn’t call it that during his difficult childhood. His abusive, alcoholic father abandoned the family, and young Wayne spent years in an orphanage and foster homes because his mother could not support him and his two brothers. Yet, as he recounts in The Power of Intention, he never had a poverty consciousness. Instead, he did whatever he could to make money for himself--collecting pop bottles, cutting lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting, delivering newspapers, and so on. After a stint in the Navy, he put himself through college with the same kind of hard work, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Educational Counseling. He was a teacher, counselor, and college professor before his current occupation of writer and lecturer. He has appeared on thousands of radio and television shows and been interviewed for a wide variety of publications.

For Dyer, intention is “an invisible energy field that is inherent in all physical form,” a part of the nonmaterial world that is Spirit. Intention has seven faces, which we must emulate to manifest our desires: creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, unlimited abundance, and receptivity.

The premise of The Power of Intention is profound: “The way to establish a relationship with Spirit and access the power of this creating principle is to continuously contemplate yourself as being surrounded by the conditions you wish to produce.” Or, as he quotes Thomas Troward, a mental-science practitioner of the early 20th century, “The law of flotation was not discovered by contemplating the sinking of things.”

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