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I Can See Clearly Now

HAY HOUSE, INC.

It's Christmastime 1941, a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. America has been drawn into war; two of my mother's brothers are serving in the military, one in Europe and the other in the Pacific. My father is no longer in the picture. His persistent carousing with other women, excessive drinking, and regular encounters as a lawbreaker, which have landed him in jail on several occasions, have finally made living with him impossible for my mother. He has simply walked away from his fatherly responsibilities, never to be heard from again. My mother is alone with three children under the age of five to feed. She's taking her three boys to her mother's house to be watched while she goes to work for the day.

My two older brothers and I are waiting with our mother for the bus to arrive on Jefferson Avenue on the east side of Detroit. We're dressed in our snowsuits, mittens, galoshes, and earmuffs, standing at the bus stop next to what appears to us to be a huge mountain of freshly plowed snow. The road is littered with salt to melt the continually falling snow, and it is one big nasty mess. A truck drives past the four of us, spraying us so hard with slush that we're knocked off of our feet. We land safely but soaked on the gigantic pile of snow.

My mother breaks down—she's dressed for work and covered with dirty, salty slush. She is exasperated. Her life is obviously out of control with the departure of her former husband, and she's doing her best to make ends meet. The lingering Depression, along with a world war, contributes to her overall situation. Work is difficult to come by, and my mother must rely upon the meager help that comes from her family. They too are overburdened by the long-term economic downturn. It is a difficult period under the best of circumstances, due to shortages of all manner of goods, and the fog of war itself.

My two brothers are very upset, too. Five-year-old Jim attempts to console our mother; three-year-old David is crying uncontrollably. Me? I am having the time of my life. This is like a nice surprise party with a big castle of snow that we're all lying on top of. We can have fun! I don't quite understand why everyone is so angry and frustrated.

And then these words came out of my mouth: "It's okay, Mommy. Don't cry. We can all just stay here and play in the snow."

I'm the baby who seldom cries; the toddler who tries to make everyone laugh and feel good, regardless of what's going on. I'm the kid who makes silly faces to change the environment from sad to glad. I am that little boy who'd be sure There must be a pony here somewhere if the sandbox was full of manure. I don't know how to be filled with sadness. My demeanor seems to be naturally inclined to look for the bright side and pay little heed to things that make everyone else dreary.

According to my mother, I'm the most independent and inquisitive little boy she and her family have ever encountered. Apparently I arrived with this happy disposition intact. I am so happy to be here in this world. At 19 months of age I am almost the same size as Dave, who is 18 months older. I try to get my brother to laugh and feel safe, because he seems to be afraid, sick, and most of the time, sad, but he seldom even smiles. I find the world so exciting, and I love wandering and exploring.

As I grow up, nothing seems to disturb or distress me. I look around and all I see brings me to a state of awe and wonder. I want everyone to be happy. I want all of the despair in my family to just disappear. I am sure we don't have to be miserable just because our father is such a shit. I want to see my mother have joy in her soul rather than all of this distress. I want my oldest brother, Jim, to stop worrying so much about Mother and his two younger brothers. If I can make them happy and have some fun, maybe all of this other stuff will just go away.

I just can't comprehend why everyone seems so dour. There are so many things to be excited about. I can play for hours with a spoon or an empty cardboard box. I love to go outside and gaze at the flowers, the butterflies, or the stray cat that keeps coming to our yard. I am in a kind of blissful state of appreciation and bewilderment almost all of the time. I also have a very strong mind of my own. I won't let anyone tell me what I can or cannot do—I insist upon discovering my boundaries on my own. When I am told no, I simply smile and then proceed to do what my inner self instructs me to do—regardless of what any big people might say about it.

I seem to be totally in a world of my own—one that's joyful, full of exciting, unlimited potentialities and discoveries that I can make on my own. No matter how hard anyone tries to make me be gloomy, they can never succeed because I came here from a Divine light, and there is nothing anyone can do to put out that light. This is who I am —a piece of God who hasn't forgotten that God is love. As am I.

I Can See Clearly Now

I can't count the number of times that my mother told me that sloshy snow-pile story. It was her favorite recollection of me just before she was forced to place David and me in a series of foster homes and orphanages; while my oldest brother, Jim, went to live with our grandmother for the better part of the next decade.

As I look back at the earliest days of my life in this incarnation, I can see clearly that the old maxim There are no accidents in this universe is a truism that applies right from the moment of our creation, and way before that as well. In an infinite universe there's truly no beginning or ending. It is only our form that is born and dies—that which occupies our form is changeless and therefore birthless and deathless.

As the father of eight children, I'm quite convinced that each individual arrives here with their own unique personality. We are intended here from an invisible held of infinite potentiality. That which has no form, has no boundaries—it's the I that's in the ever-changing body. All of the accomplishments that fill my personal résumé began taking shape at the moment of my conception, throughout my nine months of embryonic existence, and as I took my first birth breath on arrival. I look back at that little 19-month-old tyke lying on a snowbank, and not one cell that comprised that little boy is still here on planet Earth. Yet the I that was in that body is the same infinite I that recalls it all some 70 years later.

Even before I could read or write I needed a personality that would be congruous with the music I came here to play. I can see clearly now that as a child I needed to feel that I could reach out to others and help them feel better about themselves and their circumstances. I somehow knew that attitude is everything in life—even as a baby, so that the attitude my mother described to me that characterized my infancy was in some mysterious way connected to the dharma that I was to fulfill throughout this lifetime.

Lying on top of that snowbank with the rest of my family, seeing them in a deep state of distress, and instantly deciding to try to make things a bit more bearable by making them laugh or inviting them to have fun instead of being sad, is—on a spiritual level—the same as writing books about breaking free of the trap of negative thinking and enjoying life to the fullest. The form is adult with a bigger and older body, but the same infinite I is communicating through a brand-new set of eyes and ears.

I've watched all eight of my children blossom into their own awakenings. They all showed up here at birth with their own unique personalities, perhaps from a series of previous lives—the mysterious possibilities are endless. But I know for certain that the one Divine mind that is responsible for all of creation has a hand in this engaging mystery. Same parents, same environment, same culture, and yet eight unique individuals, all of whom arrived with their own distinct character traits. I think Khalil Gibran stated it perfectly in The Prophet: "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you."

We all have a mission of some kind to fulfill at the moment we make the shift from nowhere to now here, from Spirit to form. I've long realized how important it is to allow my own children to live out their inner dictates, realizing that that's precisely what I've done for my entire life, based on the stories that my mother told me of my life as a baby and then as a toddler. She was never surprised that my life unfolded as it did, because of what she observed in my infancy. Each of my children had their blueprint from God as well. My job has been to guide, then step aside, and let whatever is inside them that is their own uniqueness, steer the course of their lives.

I know that I came here to fulfill a purpose that I decided upon before undertaking that journey from invisible to solid—from Spirit to hardening into a physical reality. Beginning with the three unhappy people with me in that slushy predicament, I was actually doing the early research and practice for living a life in which I could help influence millions of people. While I was in that snowbank, I was intuitively trying to get everyone to see that we had a choice about how we looked at the situation. The I inside the kid wanted the others to know it's not really so bad—we can turn this whole thing around by laughing rather than being upset.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity. I was blessed to be able to live much of the first decade of my life in an environment where parental and other adult meddling in my life was kept to a minimum. I know that I came into the world with what I call "big dharma"—with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

Just as everything we need for our physical development is handled by a Divine, mysterious, invisible force while we develop for nine months in utero, so too is all that we need handled by the same Source for all other aspects of our being. We come from a state of perfect well-being—Divine love—and our creator needs no assistance in taking care of this unfoldment. It is only when we interfere with this celestial programming that we get off the path of God-realization.

I can see clearly today this entire universe is on purpose. I see now that our earliest personality traits and predilections are expressed because they represent our highest selves. At these early ages we are still very much connected to our Source, because we haven't yet had the chance to edge God out and assume the mantle of the false self, which is the ego.

It's spring of 1948—David is nine years old, and I'm about to turn eight. I'm screaming at the nearby customs officials who are inspecting cars entering Canada in Sombra, Ontario: "My brother is drowning—my brother is drowning! You have to do something right now—right this minute!"

It's our first time swimming in the St. Clair River this year. Last August there was a sandbar about 50 yards away from the customs dock where we swim during our summer visits. (The cottage where we stay in Sombra is owned by my mother's boyfriend and my future stepfather, Bill Drury.) During the winter, the rapid currents in the river swept the sandbar away, and David is now caught in the fast currents, unable to stand. As I watch in horror, his head goes under, and his hand is barely visible above the water's surface. This is my brother, my best friend, and my one companion through our many excursions into foster homes since we were both toddlers. He is disappearing below the surface, and for a split second I am immobilized by shock.

At this point I run into the customs shack, where Bill Laing, a friendly faced customs inspector who knows us, hears me and instantly runs to a moored boat, starts the engine, and heads toward the last spot where my brother was seen. As the boat nears the spot that I am pointing to, Dave's little hand appears one last time right above the surface. Bill and his assistant are able to pull my brother into the boat, turn him over, and push the water out of his lungs and mouth. I watch his skin color come back from its grayish non-color—Dave is going to be all right. I am so grateful that the people in the customs shack listened to my panicky screams for help. I'm amazed how quickly they got that boat started and rescued my brother.

That evening when we tell our mother about the close call, Dave is still in a state of shock. The next day, he refuses to go back into the water—and this continues for the foreseeable future.

My brother's reaction to the near-death experience is one of the most mysterious things I have ever encountered. Dave not only avoids swimming, he breaks out in severe hives if anyone tries to persuade him to go back into the water. I watch my brother carefully, as we are always together, and I notice that even when he is caught outside in a sudden rain, each drop of water that touches his skin leaves a hive mark. Dave is so severely traumatized by this incident that this condition will last for most of the rest of his life. In adulthood, raindrops continue to leave nasty reminders on his skin of his flirtation with the Grim Reaper in the St. Clair River when he was a nine-year-old boy.

Fast-forward almost three decades. David is in the Army, stationed at Ft. Riley, Kansas. I am on a trip with my nine-year-old daughter, Tracy, to publicize my book Your Erroneous Zones. We're in St. Louis and then Kansas City, so I decide to make a trip to Junction City, Kansas, to visit my brother, whom I haven't seen in many years. Dave has been stationed overseas and has done two tours of duty during the Vietnam War; he's received the Bronze Star for his extraordinary service and bravery under fire.

Here is how Dave describes what happened during our visit, in his book titled From Darkness to Light. It brings home to me the significance of his brush with death back in 1948:

In 1976 I was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, and lived in Junction City. Wayne was in town promoting his best-selling book, Your Erroneous Zones. He and his daughter Tracy were staying at the Travelodge down the street from me and invited me over for a swim in the pool.

Wayne told me to focus my thoughts on anything other than hives as we entered the pool. He kept talking to me, and I didn't have a chance to think about anything other than what he was saying. In fact, he was speaking so softly that I couldn't make out what he was saying, so I had to keep moving closer and closer to him.

Wayne purposely had drawn my attention to him. Before I knew it, I had been in the water for half an hour. When I got out of the pool and dried off, I couldn't find a single hive on my body. For the first time in 27 years, I didn't experience a breakout of hives when I went swimming. Immediately I went back into the water for another half hour with the same results. Since then I've enjoyed swimming and have never experienced an outbreak of hives again.

I Can See Clearly Now

As I stood on that dock watching my brother being swept away in those fast currents, I felt the presence of something that I am unable to express adequately here, or anyplace else in my entire lifetime. That presence is here right now in this moment as I write about one of the most significant events of my life. It is a feeling of not being alone, and a force that propels one into action instantaneously. On that late spring day it was not Dave's time to exit this lifetime, and I was the appointed one to ensure that his dharma continued.

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Excerpted from I Can See Clearly Now by Wayne W. Dyer. Copyright © 2014 Wayne W. Dyer. Excerpted by permission of HAY HOUSE, INC..
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