Something Is Missing - Update

If you have been reading my latest blogs with the series title - Something is Missing, please accept my apologies for the delay in posting recent articles. The reason for the delay is that I have been researching the link between science and matters spiritual/mystical. To be honest I have been blown away by the similarities in both these important areas. What is surprising about the scientific findings is that the general population is almost completely unaware of them and the scientific community is largely resistant to accept what they imply about the nature of reality.

My researches have therefore made me take stock and look again at how I should write my latest book (installments of which were appearing as the blog). I am going to continue but I want to try and present what I have come across in my research in a way that allows the greatest number of people to understand the enormous implications of this coming together of science and spirituality/mysticism.

I will therefore put a hold on 'Something is Missing' and instead offer a few general blogs on interesting topics in the next few months.

Thank you for your support if you are reading my blogs - it is very much appreciated!

Peter

Something Is Missing - Science (No. 3 in Series)

This is the third in a blog series that will help you discover your spirituality and experience more love and happiness in life. Previous blogs are available via the index to the right.

In the last blog I started to put forward some answers to the question "Who am I". In this blog I look at what science can tell us about what we call reality, and is has some surprises up its sleeves!

Science

I would imagine that you don’t spend much time questioning the reality of the world around you. Objects look and feel as if they are solid and exist separately from each other. You believe you are a separate person on a planet that has billions of other individuals living on it. But if you were to ask a scientist about this experience of reality they would tell you that it’s not as straight forward as it seems. Here is what they might say.

 If your eyes were able to see very small things then you would see the molecules and atoms that make up the cells of your body. If you magnified things even more you would see each atom with a number of electrons surrounding a central nucleus, which in itself is also made up of even smaller particles. The electrons would be orbiting at a huge distance out from the nucleus compared to its size. In other words most of the atom is space. Given that you are made up of atoms, this means that a vast proportion of you (and everything else in the Universe) is not solid, it is space. What gives you the sense of solidity is the forces that exist between the atoms.

These scientific discoveries completely changed our notion of reality, but even this atomic view of matter was challenged at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a number of brilliant scientists. They showed that the fundamental particles that make up atoms are not solid and can also exist as vibrational waves. With his famous equation E=MC squared, Albert Einstein showed that every piece of matter in the Universe is made up of nothing else but energy. He also showed that when we move fast, time slows down and the length of an object shrinks when looked at by somebody who is standing still. All this has been proved many times by experiment and Einstein’s corrections are applied everyday to the GPS system that orbits the earth, to make sure your satellite navigation remains accurate.

Building on Einstein’s work, other physicists started to build a new theory of matter called quantum mechanics and things became less and less intuitive. Long gone were the days of classical physics were you apply a force to an object and calculate how fast it would move or which direction it would go in. In the world of very small things everything comes down to chance. Particles can change into waves and back again and it is not possible to pin down exactly where they are and what they are doing at any particular moment. Instead the physicists had to work with probability theory to create equations that could predict the behaviour of matter statistically.

Despite the challenges of defining something that is so ephemeral, quantum mechanics has been very successful in showing how very small things manifest and behave. At first many of the implications of the new theory seemed very weird indeed, and many physicists challenged them because it was so hard to make intuitive sense of them. Nevertheless most predictions have now been confirmed by experiment. The most telling of these is that at the quantum scale of matter nothing exists in isolation. Everything in the Universe is connected to everything else. This also means that changes in one atom are felt at some level in all other atoms in the Universe. This is an astonishing scientific discovery, but as we have already seen, this is something that we already know unconsciously.

For thousands of years sages, theologians and mystics have been telling us that we are all connected in one grand state of universal oneness, and now we find that science is pointing us towards exactly the same conclusion. Of course this is not a coincidence. Deep within us is the knowledge of our natural state of being. Despite the illusion of being ‘separate entities’, we never forget that we are connected. We know intuitively that the bonds of love are always present and are incredibly important to us. The trouble is that we don’t always recognise or remember this about ourselves or the people around us. So why should this be? To answer this we must start looking into the nature of consciousness, which is the subject of the next blog.

I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them. Previous blogs in the series can be read via the list on the right.

Something Is Missing - Who Am I? (No. 2 in Series)

This is the second in a blog series that will help you discover your spirituality and experience more love and happiness in life. Previous blogs are available via the index to the right.

In the last blog I helped you to identify what is most important to you in life - love and relationships. I also asked the question, why if this is so do we so often push love away through relationship problems? I suggested that it is because we are afraid of love. In this post I will start to explain why this is by looking at how we develop our self-concepts (how we see ourselves). I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

Who Am I?

Human beings have probably been asking themselves the question “Who am I” since the beginnings of conscious thought. The fact that we are aware of our own existence creates an intense curiosity about the nature of self and our relationship to the world and the Universe at large. Although we may assume that these are just philosophical musings, the conclusions that we draw from these questions has a profound impact on our psychology, particularly the amount of fear that we experience.

Your view of who you are is likely to be largely influenced by your sense of sight. Your eyes tell you that you are separated from the people and objects around you. Your other four physical senses then reinforce this belief and confirm that you are an independent being who thinks, feels and acts in isolation. Of course you will interact with other people through the relationships that you have but you will retain your sense of separation and self-determination.

You are not alone in this self-concept. Most people have exactly the same understanding of who they are. It is possible to find some measure of success and happiness in life in this way, particularly when you are young, but what you probably don’t realise is that your belief in your own separation will ultimately damage your relationships and cause you to suffer emotionally. The reason it does this is because it is not an accurate description of who you are. Your sense of separation is an incredibly powerful illusion that has evolved to help you find food and water, protect yourself and survive in the physical world, but it hides you from a deeper truth about yourself. You are in fact intimately connected to everybody and everything.

Although you lead your life on a daily basis as if you were a separate entity, unconsciously you do know that this is not your true state of being. Deep within you is a memory that tells you that you are connected and at one with all that exists in the Universe. This memory is triggered when you either choose or are forced to let go of the material aspects of life. That was why in the earlier death-bed exercise it was so easy for you identify what really matters to you. When all the physical distractions that have preoccupied you in life have fallen away you naturally return to your authentic state. You know intuitively that this is about being re-connected to the people who have meant the most to you in life. It is like trying to get back to your true home; a place of heartfelt bonding and love.

Clearly we have a problem with perception. Our conventional senses tell us we are separate from the people and things around us but our hearts tell us that we a connected. So what is real? To understand what might be going on we can look at what science has discovered about the nature of matter. I will focus on this in the next blog...

 I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

Something Is Missing - Introduction (No. 1 in Series)

This is the first blog in a major series that will eventually be built into a book called 'Something Is Missing'. The blogs will show you how to find and develop your spirituality so you can bring more love and happiness into your life. I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

 

Many people in the more affluent and technologically developed parts of the world have a sense that ‘something is missing’ from their lives. They may be relatively successful and are materially comfortable, but they have still not found the contentment and inner peace that they crave. If you are reading this blog I assume that you are familiar with that nagging feeling. Or you might be searching for understanding and meaning following a difficult or challenging episode in your life. Although you might not be desperately unhappy, you have a feeling of emptiness inside and know that something critical is missing from your life.

Although these feelings are unpleasant, at least your intuition is working well and telling you that something is wrong with the way you are approaching life. This is useful in itself but there is much more to these feelings than this. For your intuition to warn you that something is missing, you must already know what that something is! In fact it's not missing,  it's just hidden within you at the moment. So the good news is that very thing that will bring you true happiness is lurking somewhere deep within your mind, and it is waiting to be discovered.

I hope that the fact that you already have everything you need to make you happy comes as a relief. It means you don’t need to learn anything new or strive to be anything or anybody that you are not already. You have all the gifts you need to find true and lasting happiness. You might not be aware of these things at the moment because they are largely hidden in your unconscious mind, but I will help you unearth them in these blogs.  

In order to do this I would like to take you through a process of self-discovery. It will dig down beneath the surface details and distractions of your life so you can find the real you. This will require quite a lot of personal honesty and courage because it is likely to bring up some difficult thoughts and feelings. Please don’t be put off by this. I am not trying to scare or disturb you, I am opening up these areas of your mind because by facing your fears and letting them go you will automatically reveal your underlying gifts of love and happiness.

So let’s begin with quite a challenging exercise. I want you to focus straight away on the things that matter most to you in life.

Imagine that today is the last day your life and you know that you have only a few hours left. What are you thinking and feeling? What matters most to you in these precious last few hours? What would you do? Spend a few minutes considering these questions.

How did you get on?  It’s not easy to think about these things. Most of us are not in the habit of dwelling about our own death because it brings up our deepest fears, but I hope you were able to put these aside and think about what you would want in your final hours. The worries and distractions of your daily life should have fallen away to reveal what really matters to you.

When I first asked myself these questions I was quite surprised at what came up. I didn’t think about myself at all – my mind went immediately to my children, parents, my wife and the rest of my family. Gone were all my daily concerns about money, work or health. These practical things just didn’t matter at the end of my life. All I could think about was my love for the people closest to me. Then came an aching desire for them to be by my side so I could tell them, and show them how much I loved them. I was soon overwhelmed by my emotions and am not ashamed to admit that I shed many tears.

I would guess that in your final hours you also focused on the love for the people close to you. Nothing else seems important when we face the ultimate and unavoidable conclusion to our lives. If you have ever lost somebody you love through death or faced the ending of a particularly significant relationship, you will know how painful this can be. Suddenly all the practical aspects of life fall away and you have a stark reminder that all that really matters is love and relationships.

I am always struck by how easy it is to identify the central importance of love in our lives when we face losing it. Few people would deny that it is through loving relationships that we find true happiness and success, and yet the truth is that we often struggle with this element of our lives. A vast majority of the problems that we face in life are relationship problems - at home, at work, in society, or internationally. Even our relationship with the planet we live on is out of balance and unsustainable.

So we must ask ourselves an important question. “Why if love is so important to us to do we lead our lives as if it wasn’t”? In answering this we are drawn to an inescapable and disturbing conclusion. We must be deliberately denying love and sabotaging our relationships. Dig even deeper and we discover that the only explanation for this is that we must be afraid of love.

At face-value it seems ridiculous that we could be afraid of love, something that is so beautiful and brings us so much joy. I certainly felt this way when I was first introduced to this idea, but as I have become more self-aware I have come to accept that I do indeed have this fear. I have also begun to understand where this fear comes from and how it is damaging my life and virtually everybody else’s life. It is hard to over-estimate the pain and misery that is created by this denial, and yet we are largely unaware that we are doing this to ourselves. 

In the blogs that follow I will explain where this denial comes from and how it is intimately related to our fear of love. In the next blog we will look at the process of falling in love and how this teaches us so much about love and the fears that surround it.

Next Blog: Falling In Love - What It Teaches Us About Love

This is the first blog in a major series that will eventually be built into a book called 'Something Is Missing'. The blogs will show you how to find and develop your spirituality so you can bring more love and happiness into your life. I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

The Day The Love Shone Through The Grief

Last week my wife and I attended a funeral of a friend who had committed suicide. He was fifty years old, seemed to have everything – a wonderful wife, four beautiful children, a lovely house, gainful employment and numerous talents including a gift for music. That day three hundred people crammed into a small country church to celebrate his life, while two thousand more sent their condolences via the internet. Our hearts were wrenched open with sadness and grief as we watched the coffin being carried in by his teenage sons, followed by a younger daughter, son and his wife. At that moment I am sure all of us asked the same question – “Why would somebody who was loved by so many and had so much to offer have taken his own life?”

When tragedies like this strike we all desperately search for meaning, trying somehow to make sense of the futility and cruelty of life. Those of us at the funeral could only begin to imagine the agony that his wife, children, and family are going through. But we must try and make sense of this tragedy and check out our own relationships and lives. This was certainly what my wife and I did this weekend. Ironically from such pain we can gain more awareness and can see our lives with more clarity. These are some of my thoughts:

If you are familiar with my blog and website you will know that the underlying principle is that love is not a transient emotion, but a natural state of existence – love is our essence. This means that it is always present and can never desert us. This turns everything we know about love, emotions and relationships on its head. Rather than searching for love in our lives we need to ask ourselves why we are keeping it out. By taking such an approach we begin to see that all our emotional and relationship problems come out of our denial of self-love – a denial of who we truly are. Making such a choice is the ultimate expression of free will – we can choose to experience love and happiness or not. This is our freedom as human beings but the choice to deny love comes at a terrible price for us and the people around us.

Of course we must ask why we would deny our true, loving essence? Surely that is something that we would all welcome and embrace. While it is true that we look for benefits in life and are all searching for happiness, when it comes to the love we often refuse to receive it. This can be explained in a number of ways psychologically but as we look deeper into the mind we find a place where we do not feel worthy of the love. This is always associated with guilt for having let somebody down in our lives – often somebody who themselves has struggled to embrace and express love in their own life. At a spiritual level this will extend to a belief that we have failed, denied or attacked God (in whatever form you recognise a Universal or Divine presence/source of love). If we have denied our essence as love, we become very guilty for having thrown away our gift and this then makes us feel even more unworthy – I think you can see circularity of this trap! It seems this deep layer of guilt is present in everybody, regardless of faith or a belief in things spiritual.

Such a disconnect from love and spiritual essence has far-reaching consequences to our relationships. Without feeling love within and around us through our connection to the world at large and the greater Universe, we are forced to look for it from our relationships. We need to find people to love us and replace the love that we believe is missing. This can never work because it not the truth of our lives, and this is why our dependence (and lack of self-love) causes us to suffer. Our desperate attempts to win love (or feelings of success, wealth or power that can seem like love) in fact drive true love away. Eventually, with the belief that love has deserted us, we can sink into a terrible place of depression and hopelessness.

In most cases of suicide I believe that people have lost their connection to love – both at the human and spiritual level.  They might decide to take their own life because they feel a burden on the people around them or because they can see no point in carrying on with such suffering. Those left behind can feel a terrible burden of responsibility for not being able to save their loved one and can often feel intense guilt. Tragically this can then easily destroy their lives, and the cycle of self-blame and unworthiness continues.

When things like this happen it is very important to feel all the feelings that come up – shock, sadness, grief, anger, betrayal, hopelessness and guilt itself. But in feeling these painful emotions it is also important to feel the love that is so entwined with the pain. It will seem that it is the love that is hurting, but this is an illusion. What hurts is the all the guilt and regret for unexpressed love in the past. The death of somebody we are close to instantly opens our hearts and we start feeling everything – both negative and positive. This awakens us and brings us back to life after the emotional dissociation that so often characterises our lives. This was certainly the wake-up call we had last week.

As the vicar stressed at the funeral, our friend’s love that was so evident to the people around him when he was alive, was still present in that church and will be forever more in their hearts. The love, indeed the grace, was palpable that day. It was a difficult day in so many ways but it was also very beautiful one in the way that remembering our friend brought all those who attended to a place of wholehearted honesty. It became so obvious that love is all that matters is this life. These episodes, painful as they are, are an invitation to return to love.

I am now even more determined to look at my life and embrace the love that is within me, and available to me from my connections to family, friends and colleagues as well as through my higher spiritual connection. I will also look again at the places where I am keeping love out of my life and I will work to dismantle those barriers. I will make sure that the people in my life know how much I love them and make sure I am open to receive their love. Really that is all that any of us need to do…

Peter

PS If you would like to read more of my regular blogs SUBSCRIBE at the bottom of this page

How To Fall in Love (or fall in love with your partner all over again!)

Those of you who are familiar with my website and articles will know that I offer a variety of ways to both understand and solve relationship problems. However, over the years I have come to realise that everything I suggest boils down to one key principle - and it is this principle that I want to discuss in this blog.  If you can apply what I am describing wholeheartedly, I promise you that you will fall in love and become extremely happy. If you are already in a relationship, applying these ideas will bring back the love that you had when you first met your partner.

I often use the experience of falling in love to explain how relationships work and I am going to do the same here. Think back to the last time you fell in love or experienced intense feelings of love for your partner or for anyone or anything else for that matter. As you remember that experience notice that something was absent from the relationship at that moment. That something was judgment. You fell in love (or re-discovered love) when you removed judgment from your partner (or, putting it the other way round, you totally accepted them).

To understand why this is you will need to remember that love is not an emotion - it is a permanent state that exists between you and your partner. Love is always present, even when you are not feeling it! When you were first attracted to your partner you stopped judging them - their looks and their behaviour. Instead you saw all their beauty and gifts and over-looked anything that seemed negative about them . This is the non-judgment bit. They would have sensed that you weren't judging them and would have bathed in your acceptance of them. This would make them feel great and they would have started liking you because they felt good in your presence. They then stopped judging you and the process of falling in love became a self-reinforcing positive cycle as each of you accepted each other more and more. The removal of judgment allowed you both to feel innocent and perfect and that is when your hearts opened and love showed up.  Of course this dynamic of non-judgment happened simultaneously as the two of you fell head over-heals in love!

So far, so good. The next question then is why you might fall out of love again. Well the answer is again judgement. As time goes by you begin to notice little annoying habits and things about your partner that you would like to change. You have already started judging them  - they no longer seem so perfect. And they feel this immediately. Feeling judged reminds them of how much they dislike and judge themselves and this makes them feel insecure. Rather than feel into this pain they project it onto you and start judging your behaviour (if they haven't already started doing so!). You then feel judged and the cycle spirals downwards towards the power struggle (see my website for more on this stage of a relationship). The bottom line is that you have fallen out of love and those heady early days of the relationship seem a distant memory.

Naturally you want to get back to those feelings, so here are some suggestions about how to do this. The key is to STOP JUDGING your partner. You can do this in the short term by appreciating them rather than wanting to find fault with them or change them. Notice all the wonderful things about them that you love and let them know. Pour your love onto them at every opportunity without becoming needy. If you can genuinely do this from the heart, you will fall back in love because you have brought non-judgment back to the relationship. This will work, but you may notice that you slip back very easily into judgment. This is because you probably  judge yourself both consciously and subconsciously. This means that you are continually projecting this out onto the people around you, including your partner. You will not notice you are doing this, but it will be picked up by your partner and they will then be tempted to judge you!

The way forward is to let go of the self-judgment. This requires changing the beliefs you have about yourself, particularly any guilt and feelings of failure you have stored away in your life. For more help with this have a look at my website or read my book which contains a detailed description of how self-judgment develops and how to work to change those negative beliefs and bring back the love.

As you heal self-judgment you will start accepting your life and everything in it. You will automatically reveal the love that has always been available to you and which you have caught glimpses of as you fell in love or slipped back into love at various times in your life. You can extend these periods of happiness indefinitely, simply by ending judgment. The unavoidable truth is that judgment hides love. Acceptance reveals it again. If only we could remember this and apply it to ourselves and our relationships, then our problems would cease and life would become blissful.

Bye for now, Peter

PS My new book is available on Amazon as a Kindle download or Paperback

 

Click image to learn more about the book

The No. 1 Relationship Problem-Solving Tip

My website www.iloveyouloveme.com provides help with the range of typical problems that can crop up in a relationship. There is however one issue that is common to all these problems, and in fact it’s the most important relationship principle there is. It is:

If your partner is behaving badly,
they are hurting inside

While this is a simple enough idea, it is incredibly difficult to accept in practice. When your partner is behaving in an unpleasant or hurtful way, the last thing you will feel like doing is to be kind and empathic towards them. And yet this emotionally mature response to bad behaviour is the key to solving your problems and having a much happier, love-filled relationship.

The way to work with this principle is to understand the underlying cause of all relationship problems. Our essential state is one of love and connection to the people and world around us. We suffer whenever we turn away from this state and start believing that we are separate and personally lacking in love. When we lose our connection to love, fear and pain immediately enters our mind. We try to ignore this pain by becoming dependent on the people around us to give us love, or by becoming independent so that we can pretend that we don’t need love. Both these strategies create a range of negative behaviours that push our partners away and hurts them.

So if your partner is driving you mad, under-valuing you, withdrawing from you, or acting in an untrustworthy way (or any number of other problematic ways), then they have lost touch with their natural state of love and connection. It doesn’t matter how confident and happy they seem on the surface, if you are not experiencing love from them, then they are hurting inside.

The way forward for any relationship problem is therefore to recognise bad behaviour as a call for love.  Avoid judging your partner for their behaviour and then open your heart so you can bring love back to yourself and your partner. This is an act of supreme leadership, but I promise you that it will always work. Do have a look at my online coaching module called Lovecoach for practical ways to solve a variety of relationship problems using the principle I have just described.

If you like this blog, why not subscribe to my regular issues? – and please tell your friends about the blog and website if you think that it would be useful to them.

If have just launched my new e-book - Bringing Back The Love. It explains all the principles I use in my website and blog in detail and provides lots of coaching exercises for you to work through to bring more love into your life. - if you are interested click this.

Bye for now.

Peter