“Wishes Fulfilled” by Wayne Dyer

When you look back and see all your influences – books, movies, events, acquaintances, or any forms of experience ‒ you come to realize that some stand out as significant. These affect your values, your assumptions, and your understandings. Well, in all honesty, for me, “Wishes Fulfilled” by the late Dr. Wayne Dyer is one of those significant influences. This book also resulted in a landslide of subsequent readings and understandings, so I am very much obliged to place it as a cornerstone in my own study of higher consciousness and awareness.

“Wishes Fulfilled” is a concise book, approximately 200 pages long, divided into two parts with a total of nine chapters. It is a short and compact book that is easy to read, yet susceptible to repeated reading, as Dr. Dyer has done a great job of filling it to the brim with quotes, references, and suggestions. It both opens and ends with the author’s own experiences of miracles, as he calls them. At the start of the book, it is suggested that an extraordinary life is possible and accessible to anyone who endeavors to unlock and use their higher consciousness. Dr. Dyer provides many extraordinary examples from his life that directly result from such an endeavor (I also have several examples from my own experience). So, these miracles referred to in the book might look impossible and improbable to people who live below their potential, but once you start living a wishes fulfilled life, they quickly become quite normal.

The beautiful thing about living a wishes fulfilled life is not in any gain, be it material or emotional. In the first chapter, Dr. Dyer quickly relates to the reader that such a mode of being is related to the ideals of the soul:

“The ideal of your soul, the thing that it yearns for, is not more knowledge. It is not interested in comparison, nor winning, nor light, nor ownership, nor even happiness. The ideal of your soul is space, expansion, and immensity, and the one thing it needs more than anything else is to be free to expand, to reach out and to embrace the infinite. Why? Because your soul is infinity itself.

Indeed, once you start implementing the suggestions from the book, the first thing that becomes apparent is the vast space of possibilities at your disposal. This brings an exciting form of serenity and confidence. To quote the motivational speaker Les Brown, “You come to find that the Universe is on your side”.

The I AM awareness

The cornerstone of “Wishes Fulfilled” lies in what Dr. Wayne Dyer refers to as the “I am presence” or “I am awareness.” This concept can be found in various sources; one of the more ancient ones is the Old Testament, where God relates to Moses in the Burning Bush that God’s name is “I am that I am.” This phrase quite simply means that every time you use “I am,” you are talking about God. Any definition or adjective added to it is targeted at God, even though when we speak of “I am,” we are commonly referring to a false identity, that is, the ego. This phenomenon is beautifully touched upon by Alan Watts in one of his lectures:

“I wonder what you mean when you use the word I. I have been very interested in this problem for a long, long time, and I have come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination. That is to say, a false sense of personal identity that is in complete variance with the facts of nature.”

So, the shift from this hallucination to the valid I am awareness is what the book “Wishes Fulfilled” is all about. Dr. Dyer quite eloquently and pragmatically tackles this problem, first by conceptualizing how you identify yourself (chapters 1 to 3) and then contextualizing this new concept with the Five Wishes Fulfilled Foundations. In these foundations, the author relates to the power of imagination, attention, feelings, and dreams. Additionally, the notion of “living from the end” is introduced, which is simply assuming that your wish is already fulfilled. It is what I refer to as “letting go of the end result” in my book “Escape from the Ship”.

Dr. Dyer places the primary focus on who you really are and how to connect to your true nature with compassion and evidence to acknowledge any possible intellectual dismissal from the skeptic. Your wishes, whether monetary, relational, emotional, concrete, or vague, take a secondary role. When you realize who you are, the hallucination Alan Watts refers to falls apart, and your wishes naturally gravitate to your higher nature. So, the book does not deal with material techniques, and as the author himself states:

“However, I’m not proposing memorizing an esoteric formula leading to a theoretical nirvana. My emphasis throughout this book is that manifestation is real and that it occurs when you make a specific decision to change your mind about who you are and what is possible for you to achieve within these parentheses in eternity called your life.”

Thus, the book is less about techniques and more about understanding core principles. Once these principles and the corresponding examples and suggestions sink in, your mind knows what to do, and your life experience shifts quite naturally. You start being careful and mindful of how you use the words I am and see the effect this has on your life. Again, to repeat, this is not some affirmation that mechanically does things because of your stubborn reiteration. Taking Dr. Dyer’s words to heart, you practice the I am presence for its own sake. 

At the crossroads of many teachings.

“Wishes Fulfilled” is one of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s later books, published in 2012, when the author was 72 years old. Dr. Dyer was a very industrious writer and published nearly 50 books in his lifetime. I have had the pleasure of reading and rereading his most notable books. From my vantage point, “Wishes Fulfilled” (probably along with “The Power of Intention” and “Excuses Be Gone”) are his most significant works I have encountered so far. Through his writing, Dr. Dyer is a passionate sharer of both ancient and modern ideas and has been more than generous in citing all the sources of wisdom he could get his hands on. In fact, thanks to Dr. Wayne Dyer, I was fortunate to read U. S. Andersen’s “Three Magic Words” (dedicated book review here), the Tao Te Ching, and the works of Alan Watts (dedicated author review here), and these are just the more notable ones! It looks like Dr. Dyer understood how powerful and crucial the sharing and magnifying of ideas can be. Each of his books contains great ideas, suggestions, principles, and a detailed reading list to keep you on the path to higher consciousness.  

In “Wishes Fulfilled,” the author heavily quotes from U. S. Anderson, Neville, the I Am discourses by St. Germaine, and the list goes on. I myself have not even gone through half of the homework left for me in this little book. But Dr. Dyer does more than that; he endeavors to explain complex concepts in a down-to-earth manner. Thus, his writing is akin to an amplifier of teachings, some contemporary, some religious, esoteric, or from the initiatic sciences. For me, “Wishes Fulfilled” ignited a giddy hype of curiosity to find out as much as I can about the principles related by the author. Wayne Dyer’s initial guidance helped me find and understand more fascinating books and programs on the topic of higher awareness, for which I am truly grateful.

Me and “Wishes Fulfilled”

As I write this modest review, I can help but relate my own experience concerning “Wishes Fulfilled”. As an author, at one point, I had a long recess from creative writing while pursuing a PhD, where for about 4-5 years, I only wrote scientific papers and my thesis. I had an idea for my first non-fiction book in English, but didn’t really move towards realizing it for some time. Then I read “Wishes Fulfilled” and subsequently other books by Dr. Dyer, and soon found myself starting work on my book, “Escape from the Ship”, which was linked earlier.

I found myself fascinated by “Wishes Fulfilled” and examined it as a benchmark by which to gauge my writing, even going so far as to aim for the same book and chapter length. I diligently practiced the principles suggested by Wayne Dyer, including the Moses Code Meditation, which is described at the end of the book. Without knowing it, I was applying the techniques in “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon, and much like Kleon suggested, what started as imitation morphed into something unique as I developed the book over the course of three years. Gradually, the ideas by Dr. Dyer gave way to new ones with which they coexisted. But hands down, “Wishes Fulfilled” got me started, which is often the most crucial step.

Who should read “Wishes Fulfilled”?

Obviously, this meager review falls far short of the real thing, so go and read “Wishes Fulfilled”. It is a book that falls in both the self-help and esoteric categories, making it a great entry point into more complex topics beyond the typical goal-oriented programs. Frankly, this is a book I would suggest to anyone, especially if you are drawn to motivation and conscious living; this work fits your interests perfectly.

I must say that in his effort to explain complex topics, Dr. Dyer is often forced to simplify them so that their message can be understood more widely. When I compare “Wishes Fulfilled” to “Three Magic Words” by U. S. Andersen, for example, I confess that the latter is better, written more beautifully, and the principles of higher awareness are explained more deeply. But this is quite natural, just as Dr. Dyer communicated and perhaps even imitated Andersen’s writing, so did Andersen himself imitate Edward Carpenter and others. I look at it this way: there is a living idea that has existed for millennia. It jumps from host to host over the ages, and each one (a prophet, a sage, a writer, a speaker) gives nuances to this idea from his own unique point of view.

I think Wayne Dyer’s “Wishes Fulfilled” is the book to read first before other, more complex works, simply because the author made a dedicated effort to make certain ancient laws and principles understandable and provided a good reference list for the devoted student to follow up on. The book opens a new dimension, with so many fascinating options from which one’s soul may expand further.

Living a Wishes Fulfilled Life

Usually, I end a review with the previous section, but I feel obliged to add a few more lines about what it feels like to live a wishes fulfilled life, at least from my own experience. We usually think of change like the switching of some relative or absolute opposites, like the change from day to night. When encompassing new things in general, I prefer to think of Carlos Castaneda’s parable of the rooms in a mansion. Once you start living the principles in “Wishes Fulfilled,” you open up a new, large room in the mansion that is your life. The old room you once knew still remains, although influenced by your latest findings, it can be quite the same; however, you feel distinctly a new immensity at your disposal. To quote Dr. Dyer.    

“Extraordinary encompasses most of ordinary, since we all live in the same physical world. There will be forms to fill out, rules that demand our obedience, bills to pay, and family obligations to attend to. But extraordinary consciousness is associated with your soul, that invisible, boundaryless energy that looks out from behind your eyeballs and has very different interests than your ordinary self does.”      

I suppose one of the more significant things is that as you start living a wishes fulfilled life, your wishes themselves shift to meet your Highest Self. On the flipside, life still feels much the same, and now and then you digress back, only to keep your awareness on its toes. As the spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle reminds us, “There is the ripple and there is the ocean,” which means that even if you know in heart and mind your Highest Self and God, this does not abolish your ego and ego-driven weaknesses. You cannot cure yourself of being human, but if you encompass and nurture your real “I am,” you will take more interest and awareness in the great ocean than in the fluctuating ripples that come and go on its surface.