"Self-actualization guru Dyer has a talent for appropriating age-old spiritual concepts and marketing them with buzzwords like "spiritual manifestation." Here he outlines nine principles for manifesting spiritual destiny, which appears to be synonymous with getting everything we want. According to Dyer, if we can just get out of our ego's reach, the power of the universe would act in us to bring us everything we truly desire. By putting worthy spiritual ideals to the service of personal power, Dyer subverts the meaning of unconditional love, seeing it as the means to an end rather than a worthy end in itself."

from Booklist...

"Best-selling author Dyer says this title is different from any other he's written, but his 1992 book, Real Magic, was also about 'using your invisible self to influence physical reality.' Here, the message is muddled. On one hand, he tells readers that inner peace should be their greatest goal, but, on the other hand, he offers techniques designed to attain more worldly objectives, like a new job. There's lots about meditating and chanting, and he supplies distillations from A Course in Miracles, but ultimately, the volume veers close to the low end of New Age gobbledygook."

Emphasis mine. You can laugh at this silly shit I've been posting about the self-styled (emphasis on the self) New Age, but while bloggers, journalists, and academic theorists ponder the state of the world and the nature of some abstract "reality," it's assholes like Wayne Dyer, Scott Peck, Nathaniel Branden, and Marianne Williamson (note yet another reference above to A Course in Miracles; they're everywhere in this stuff) who are redefining our culture, notions of identity, and relationship to each other. Letting this "literature" pass as being beneath our too-sophisticated-to-care consideration is tantamount to giving these pernicious "ideas" free reign to work their black bricolage unopposed. Caveat emptor, motherfuckers.