A Teacher
Wayne Dyer
Intention & self-determination
The transmission
Wayne Dyer was an American self-help author and speaker, trained as a counseling psychologist, who became one of the most popular spiritual teachers of his generation.
His first book Your Erroneous Zones (1976) was a mass-market psychology bestseller, but over his career he moved steadily toward an explicitly spiritual, New Thought–inflected message, culminating in works such as The Power of Intention (2004) and his late embrace of Neville Goddard’s teaching, which he credited with deeply influencing his final years.
Through frequent PBS specials he reached a vast television audience. Dyer’s role in the Atlas is as a key transmitter who carried New Thought into late-20th/early-21st-century mass culture, explicitly bridging humanistic psychology and the manifestation tradition.
His concept of “intention” as a field one connects to in order to co-create one’s life is a softened, spiritualized restatement of New Thought mental causation, and his public championing of Neville Goddard helped drive the contemporary revival of the Law of Assumption (linking to )., Dyer exemplifies the recombination of New Thought, Eastern philosophy (he wrote a book on the Tao Te Ching), and humanistic psychology into accessible spiritual self-help.
What they gave
The power of intention: Reframed New Thought mental causation as connecting to an intentional “field.”
- Neville revival: Publicly championed Goddard, helping drive the modern Law-of-Assumption resurgence.
- Psychology→spirituality bridge: Moved from clinical self-help toward New Thought metaphysics.
- Mass transmission: Reached enormous audiences via books and PBS.
In their words
Simply put, your concept of yourself is everything that you believe to be true. And everything that you believe to be true about yourself has landed you precisely where you live and breathe every day of your life.
Who you are is a formless energy — a spirit, if you will — with the capacity to be unchanged, and at the same time occupy an infinity of bodies.
You are changeless and therefore real. What you’ve believed were facts explaining who you are, are simply illusions — or what metaphysicians call unreal.
I am an infinite being who originated not from my parents, but from a Source that is itself birthless, deathless, and changeless.
Every time you think of the expression I Am, you initiate God in action.
Your imagination is unlimited. What is today, is restricted by just that: what is today.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: New Thought (Ernest Holmes); Neville Goddard; humanistic psychology (Maslow); Eastern thought (Tao Te Ching).
- Taught / Influenced: mass-market spiritual self-help; “power of intention” vocabulary; the modern Neville/Law-of-Assumption revival.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Your Erroneous Zones1976
- The Power of Intention2004
- Wishes Fulfilled2012