I had Dr. Wayne W. Dyer's The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way recommended to me as being less "newagey" than many of the "laws of attraction" books that I've been beating myself over the head with of late, and I will admit that, for the most part, it's not as fluffy as the others. However, I never quite was able to get into synch with this. Dyer goes for substantial chunks of this sounding very reasonable, providing applicable "coaching" for various approaches to intention, but then will drop in something that seemed (to me, at least) to come completely out of left field. Now, over the years when I was publishing "metaphysical" books, I had to wade through a whole lot of B.S. to get to the things that I felt were of sufficient value to actually get into print, so maybe I'm a bit sensitive about stuff that is pretending to be "science" but isn't. I was rather disappointed to find Dyer using "resistance testing" as a basis of saying that "studies have proven" some thing or another ... I've seen enough of this to have no confidence that it proves anything. I also had the "B.S. meter" redlining when he quoted "research" as to how "high-energy people counterbalance the negative effect of low-energy people", complete with "levels of vibration" and impressive-looking numbers (with no evident substance) for how many "negative" people would be balanced for each "higher" person. It's a shame that a book that didn't need this sort of crap is tainted with it.
On the positive side, The Power of Intention has some fairly practical advice for "aligning with the source" (much like concepts of the Tao), and being able to bring that "creative energy" into one's life. Unfortunately, the useful parts are burdened with all the "newage" baggage. One part that I particularly didn't "get" was the "Seven Faces of Intention", a concept that Dyer outlines over a few pages in an early chapter, and then refers to off-handedly at random times through the rest of the book, as if this was something functional like gravity or magnetism! These "seven faces" are creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance, and receptivity ... but what than "means" as a symbolic unit never becomes particularly clear.
Now, this sounds like I didn't like the book, which is not exactly true. I found his approach to energy, perception, awareness, the whole "source" concept, etc. very interesting, and fairly useful (in fact, putting Tolle's The Power of Now into the context of this book made those concepts far less muddled) ... it's just that it would have been so much better had the egregious twaddle (as discussed above) been edited out! I will admit that there were times where Dyer was drifting into that "no abundance for you" believe-or-be-screwed stuff (ala The Secret) but on the whole his focus on constantly steering away from "low energy" thoughts and behavior patterns made this a whole lot less strident and far easier to put into practice!.
I see that this was presented in some form on public TV, and I wonder how that played out ... needless to say, it's still in print, so should be available at your local bookstore if you want to get a "retail" copy. The good news of the media exposure it had is that there are tons of copies out in the new/used channel, with "like new" copies available (at the time I'm writing this) for under a buck via some of the Amazon vendors (and "new" copies for only $2). I might be hesitant to recommend this at the $25 cover price, but being that it can be obtained for so little cash at the moment, I'd say "go for it" ... it certainly is one of the better "law of attraction" books that I've seen, so it could be a good place to start if you were wanting to look into that genre.
